Thanks to a tip from Rebecca Blood, I read the article by Anil Dash in his cool new magazine. He writes about MS SharePoint Team Services and its “list” feature, which incorporates most or all of the functionality of weblogs for an intranet environment.
I remember when the portal brand of SharePoint was supposed to be MS’s entry into the enterprise portal market and I’m not sure what really came of that. I would appear that this use of STS, even if split off from the other collaborative, project-management features, would pose a threat mainly to Radio’s penetration into the corporate market (if at all—I doubt it competes on price!).
It definitely bears watching, since everyone’s been looking over their shoulder in this market for a long time.
Here’s part of Anil’s conclusion:
So how serious is the threat? To the overwhelming majority of personal weblog communities existing today, SharePoint is probably not going to have an impact in the short term. It’s possible that Microsoft will realize the potential of their bCentral service hosting SharePoint sites, and that the MSN team will seize the opportunity to improve the friendliness of the interface and turn it into a commercial mass-market product. The likelihood of that, however, is completly negligible. On the business side, though, Microsoft has pieces in place that put it a full year ahead of any competitor in the areas of network identity integration, document management, and project management functions. This advantage is probably negated by the significantly higher platform costs of a solution that requires a Windows server, even if there are no per-client costs.