Will Microsoft kill Drupal?
The title is intentionally drastic, of course, but two recent posts make the thought come up. The first is a post from Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal:
I wonder what impact the introduction of SharePoint 2007 will have. What was once an important Drupal differentiator (i.e. bundling a wide variety of functionality into a single platform) will finally become commodity in 2007. Instead, seamless integration with other applications might become essential to compete? Interesting times!
Shockingly, he’s talking about Microsoft adopting some of the features used by FOSS projects.
Especially the introduction of SharePoint 2007 might have significant impact on this particular market. SharePoint 2007 adds features like forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news aggregation, surveys, issue tracking … but also install profiles and custom content types. Clearly, Microsoft decided to play catch up. And rumor has it that the improved integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook is jaw-dropping.
Secondly, this post from a frustrated designer about the lack of Drupal developers for hire suggests that Drupal may really hit a wall in 2007.
Demand for Drupal related services is increasing exponentially, as is evident from the increase in inquiries at my website this past year. Unfortunately, it seems the availability of Drupal related services are not increasing to match.
I had one especially hell-ish project this year because I was not able to find a developer to help me with some modifications.
It is entirely possible that I was one of the people who turned that project down. (If so, I used reason #1 from her list: “Unfamiliarity with the module(s) involved.”)
Here’s the issue:
- More people want the services that the Drupal platform provides.
- Not all of those people are not technical enough to use the Drupal platform without support.
- Microsoft (and others) can afford to offer support that makes users more comfortable with their product than with FOSS alternatives. (Notice that I didn’t say ‘better’ before flaming me, please.)
This is how Microsoft won the desktop war: it co-opted popular features and packaged them in a less-threatening way (especially to corporate IT departments). I’d bet that our IT guys would prefer SharePoint to Drupal; except for the fact that we don’t trust IIS servers and won’t put them in our data farm.
I’ll say more as a prediction for 2007.
6 Comments so far
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It’s not the same market. Microsoft Aims for organizations. Drupal is open. Both systems have place. We live in a world of coopetition (collaboration + competition, merged together).
Of course Drupal must get better all the time. but it happens.
Amnon
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Web Archtiect
Drupal Israel
By Amnon Levav on 01.03.07 4:13 am
Well, you know, looking at the FOSS link above, we can gain enormously in “pilfering” Use Cases: most Drupal geeks don’t realize the value of what they are working with in terms of the things you can actually do with Drupal, and actually have value for customers.
Obviously Views and CCK and others are steps in the right directions, but the real key question is, will us Geeks know how to eat our own dogfood?
So, for example, a module to share spreadsheets? “business intelligence”
Mentoring sites! (”team services”)
Teach people about the incredible Drupal revisions and version control for document management!
etc, etc, etc.
Drupal can and will be leveraged itself!
By Victor Kane on 01.03.07 7:37 am
Just an idea…but it would be GREAT if it could be implemented:
Maybe Drupal developers could partner with OpenOffice’s ones and create a module to publish OpenOffice’s ODF files directly to a drupal site, thus creating a very powerful and cheap intranet document management system.
Also have a look at the docmgr.org project.
If Drupal could implement something like the above proposed it would be a wonderful bonus for every OpenOffice user and for the spread of Drupal (benefitting from the popularity of OpenOffice) and for the advancement OpenOffice in the traditionally MS dominated corporate arena due to environments like sharepoint-exchange, and then the cost to implement a similar Sharepoint+MsOffice solution would not be justified for corporations!!!
David B. (Subsonica) -Spain-
By SubSonica on 01.03.07 7:39 am
Its either Microsoft or Drupal !! and it looks like the MS will be the loser…
By ramon on 01.03.07 11:25 am
A) Sharepoint is expensive, requiring clients to be current versions of MS Office. (To be full citizens.)
B) It only has a small subset of Drupal’s (and other CMS) modules.
C) Collaborating is what companies do, not non-profit web communities. Action at a web site is fast. Collaborating slow.
D)The model and whole way of thinking; some company operatives collaborating on some document which is then “published” to the world is not what CMS is about.
E) Sitepoint is not Open Source.
F) Too much baggage in sitepoint.
G) This product is too little too late.
used to sell a $30,000 product with the same functionality as Drupal.
H) Never trust Microsoft unless you absolutly have to.
By lanzdale on 04.20.07 8:12 pm
I don’t think drupal and sharepoint operate in the same space at all. Drupal is a ‘one size fits all after some tailoring’ environment, sharepoint is a closed source pile of services bunched together, if it doesn’t do what you want it to do you’re sore out of luck. And if it does happen to do what you want it to do then you’ll be sore out of luck when MS decides end-of-life time should roll around so they can force-upgrade you to the next incarnation of their stuff for a good sized fee.
Other open source CMS’s (and drupal is much more than just a CMS) are much more likely to compete for the same spots as drupal does.
What drupal needs imho is to become more ‘orthogonal’, in other words to get rid of all the special cases and to present everything in the same way. So cck for everything or nothing, everything is a node or just use databases, make it easier to do common stuff such as media handling and make it *MUCH* easier to create intra node links.
It also needs to get out of the ’small site’ tool mindset, some of the code is absolutely naive when it comes to dealing with high volume traffic.
That’s not negative, just constructive criticism from an old hand code jockey that is learning about drupal the hard way (by studying the source) and trying to build a reasonably complex database application using drupal to get a good feel for the platform.
best regards
Jacques Mattheij
By Jacques Mattheij on 12.21.07 5:29 pm
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