What does the SharePoint Solutions 'Long Tail' look like?
I am sure there are a number of ways to draw the Long Tail of SharePoint. Ironically at the partner meetings I attended that week in Seattle Arpan Shah from the Microsoft SharePoint team did talk about the Long Tail of Content and SharePoint. As an ISV we naturally tend to think about SharePoint in terms of repeatable solutions hence the solution orientation in the tail diagram below. I have broken this particular depiction of the SharePoint long tail into 3 "solution" sections:
- SharePoint itself comes out of the box with canned solutions to many common problems like the ones cited on the diagram (e.g. Team Collaboration). These solutions (sometimes called workloads) are provided by Microsoft and are pretty easy to use and customize out of the box for many business scenarios. They account for a very large percentage of the initial usage of SharePoint.
- Microsoft partner companies (mainly ISV's and sometimes System Integrators) build solutions to common problems that are generally available for purchase and can be re-used by customers or indeed system integrators.
- Customers themselves build their own solutions to their own problems (sometimes with the help of Microsoft System Integrator partner companies) but very few of these are available and reusable today.
How long is the SharePoint tail?
There are probably a number of ways to measure the length of the SharePoint tail but let me start with the traditional measures of revenue and users. I am sure my data in this respect is not fully accurate and I welcome any corrections but it is probably in the right ballpark for this blog article. As most of the readers will know there are two main versions of SharePoint - the free one (Windows SharePoint Services v3 or WSS for short) and the paid one (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or MOSS for short). The last set of public numbers I saw explained that MOSS revenue had now exceeded $1Bn per year and the number of organizations that had bought MOSS was in excess of 17,000 and that the number of user licenses sold was in excess of 100 million. That last number (100million users of the paid version of SharePoint - MOSS) is staggering when you consider that there are about 500 million licensed users of Office (as far as I know). MOSS by all accounts is the fastest growing server product Microsoft has ever marketed. I have not seen recent data for the number of organizations who have deployed the free version of SharePoint - WSS - but one would imagine that they'd have to be somewhere between 5x and 10x (at a guess) of the number of organizations who have the paid version - MOSS. That would put the number of organizations with WSS deployed at somewhere between 85,000 and 170,000. Wow - a pretty long tail or is it a big head?!
SharePoint – do we want a longer tail of solutions?
You might imagine that we at BrightWork as a very committed SharePoint ISV might want as short a tail as possible. If there were a short tail with a very limited set of products then one might argue that there would be way less variety for the consumers and our project management plug-in for SharePoint would have a more captive audience. But this is a very limited view and we do not hold it!!! We started as a Lotus Notes ISV back in the day and even though our history shows that we left the Lotus ship way before the masses, I do know it was extremely painful for so many customers to invest in the Lotus platform only to see it practically die away by comparison to the market leading position it had in the collaborative space in the early to mid 1990's. Customers have made a massive investment in the SharePoint platform - just look at the numbers above - and they need, want and deserve a stronger and longer SharePoint tail. For customers (especially in these tougher economic times) having one platform like SharePoint that has so many solutions to so many common business problems will save customers time and money in the short, medium and long term. A strong SharePoint market with as long a tail as possible is good for the entire community - good for Microsoft, the partners and especially good for the customers.
How to get a Longer Tail
In the book Chris Anderson calls out three factors that help to strengthen and lengthen the tail. Simply put these are:
- Democratise production - make it very easy for all to produce the solutions (especially the "amateurs")
- This gives us way more solutions - which populates / lengthens the tail
- Democratise distribution - make the multitude of new solutions very available
- This gives more access to the new niches which fattens the tail - makes it deeper / thicker
- Connect supply and demand - tap consumer sentiment to connect the demand to the supply
- This drives business from hits to niches - by helping people find what they want using filters, recommendations and other shortcuts
Proceed to 'part 3 of 3' of this blog article