The Wall Street Journal has a long article today titled Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software. It positions SharePoint clearly in the collaboration battle that is emerging with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, EMC, Cisco, and Google and then goes on to mention “lesser-known players” such as Zimbra, Alfresco, Plone, and Socialtext.
According to the article Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses of SharePoint across 17,000 companies. Say that again slowly: 85 million licenses across 17,000 companies. I don’t know how many are “free” (according to the WSJ Microsoft has to be careful about giving SharePoint away due to their antitrust settlement) and while I used to tease my friends at Microsoft about simply giving away SharePoint and not caring who used it, this clearly was an effective strategy.
17,000 companies. I wrote about my positive experience with SharePoint recently. I now use it every day as part of my regularly work activity and am very pleased. I’m expecting the hosted version of SharePoint to be announced anyday (maybe at Mix) which will be a logical stab by Microsoft back at Google’s collaboration activity.