The Microsoft Portal Perspective

Microsoft takes a different perspective on the portal market than its competitors. Microsoft has not tried to combat the pure play portal companies head-on, with high priced enterprise products that require a long and expensive deployment process. Indeed, Microsoft executives have denigrated the portal perspectives of their competitors . "The cynical description is that it's just a really expensive web site," according to Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft .NET. "Fundamentally, we're on a different planet than the big iron, big brother [portal] guys." ^[1] He was referring to portal efforts that call for centralization of all applications and promote a monolithic software environment, usually based on Unix and Java. Fitzgerald asserts that many competitive portal products are wrongheaded returns to the mainframe mentality , risky and expensive to implement, and lacking in broadly used developer tools.

^[1] Jim Ericson, "Microsoft and the Portal," Line56, September 12, 2002.

According to Microsoft, the goal of moving all applications to the browser and consolidating all these applications into a single window is a fool's errand. While this approach might in theory streamline development and reduce administration costs, it is essentially a return to the dumb terminal mainframe past, and it forsakes the huge investment in workstation intelligence already made by organizations and individuals. This processing power is meant to be used to enhance performance, minimize network traffic, and manipulate the user interface in ways that enhance productivity. In the Microsoft view, users will end up spending their time not in one single browser-based application but in three: the portal for application integration, Outlook and Exchange for messaging and calendars, and Windows Explorer to directly access documents and other resources.

Most users will spend more time using office productivity suites than a browser because document creation and editing demand as much desktop real estate as is available, as well as the ability to work disconnected from the network and without the inherent delays imposed by Internet latency. I can attest that I spend my workday in a three-or four-window world, albeit with multiple instances of each type of application. I would not be thrilled to give up these rich, multiwindow applications such as Outlook and Word, or similar custom applications.

Some portal concepts take the idea of consolidating user views too far. I once met a customer who was fixated on the idea of having one browser window run all the applications he needed. He started by asking how to make these applications fit within a single window, using a small "dashboard" element to provide some summary information from each application. Next, he asked how one application could expand to use more of the screen and make the others shrink. Finally, he asked for a quick way to switch among applications. Considering that his computer was running Windows 2000, he already had the solution at his fingertips. The value of Alt-Tab should not be underestimated.

Microsoft has a huge investment in the processing power and functionality of workstations, as the majority of its revenue comes from sales of operating systems and end-user productivity tools. If competing portal vendors achieve their vision of making the portal user interface the new desktop, they will create a powerful threat to Microsoft. Therefore it makes sense for the company to oppose a philosophy that minimizes the role of the client, even as many Microsoft products enhance the role of the server. Microsoft is unlikely to concede the battle it has already won, the battle for the desktop, to a portal upstart.

The approach of integrating portals deep in the Windows platform makes sense in light of the markets that Microsoft chooses to pursue . The company has maintained that it is not a vertical solution company and it is not interested in dominating small niches . Instead, it has often waited until a product category reaches critical mass before building or buying a product to bring to market. For instance, Microsoft was one of the last major vendors to come up with a content management offering when it bought the Canadian company NCompass and its Resolution product. Another example is Microsoft's customer relationship management package (Microsoft Business Solutions CRM), which targets the small and medium business market segment. Microsoft waited for the market to consolidate and created an offering at the low end where there is a mass market for its product.

When it does enter a market, Microsoft often offers a price well below competitive offerings in order to further expand the size of the total market. Microsoft knows that market share and a large user base are ultimately its winning formula rather than extracting maximum dollars from a single, small customer base.

Another underlying trend that explains Microsoft's portal strategy is the steady addition of new features to the operating system. Some portal elements will be taken for granted in the operating systems of the future rather than offered as expensive add-ons to be supported by a third-party vendor. For instance, collaboration features such as document sharing, chat, and threaded discussion have been built into end-user suites such as Microsoft Office. Document management itself could plausibly be added to the operating system as well ”or at least version control and check-in, check-out functionality. Those of us who remember computing before Windows may recall that version control was an inherent part of the Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS operating system. As the line between the file system and a relational database system continues to blur, storage for documents, structured information, and web content could easily become part of the core operating system.

Portal innovations have come from three distinct groups at Microsoft: the Office product group, the enterprise group , and the online Microsoft properties such as MSN and microsoft.com. By understanding the heritage and destiny of the key portal products, you can make better decisions on where to place your technology "bets."