Thomas,many many many thanks for the post. You know for how long we have been waiting this piece..

I hope to read valid objections (like Mike Gotta’s ones) based on real customer experiences to further validate this discussion, but I was the one asking that question to Lockheed Martin and I believe their answer really makes the point here!

My question is: why Microsoft has not being able to already catch Jive, Telligent, Newsgator? They have for sure the power, penetration, money, energy needed to fill in the gap. My answer is that E2.0 is still too small for them to play. Sharepoint (this is what I heard from Laurence Liu when he was with Microsoft) is a development platform (i.e pay and customize a lot) not an enterprise 2.0 platform (pure e2.0 nature, already emergent, transparent, open, freeform, with a low barrier of participation, easily customizable and integrated with a plenty of other tools). I completely agree on what Lee said: IT guys rarely think in terms of people adoption, while this is the only value realization for enterprise 2.0 (have a look to the recent Sandhill Group report).

For many customers Sharepoint is and will be the best option, but selling it as an enterprise 2.0 is just silly and I don’t buy what Mike is saying on twitter. Enterprise 2.0 is not the technology but the (bad) technology can really hinder user adoption. Using it the right way doesn’t solve the issue with technology itself and simply means spending more money to potentially reach the same results.

What I see for the future is Microsoft buying some of his sons. Telligent could be a tasty bite…