Lawrence Liu's Report from the Inside

Wow, it's been almost 6 months since my previous blog entry! Rather than pontificate about SCB/E2.0 on my blog or elsewhere as if I know everything (I don't) about this rapidly evolving area of business computing, I've spent much of my time talking with customers and partners and working with our engineering teams to align our investments in social computing with business problems that customers and partners are trying to solve. There's still much work for me to do, but I will definitely try to blog more starting in April. There are so many exciting developments that I'd like to share with you!

I'm posting this entry right now because I've had a large number of escalations directed towards me in the form of questions about specific technologies such as blog, wiki, tagging, social networking, etc. My default response has been, "What business problem(s) is your customer trying to solve?" It's a simple question to which most of the time the response is a much different inquiry than the initial question. So, if you're a Microsoft customer, when you push your Microsoft account team for answers about specific social computing functionality, please provide the context for what business problem(s) you're trying to solve, so I won't have to ask if/when your inquiry ultimately reaches me. :-) If you're not sure what types of business problems can be solved by social computing, take a look at this blog entry by Josh Bernoff of Forrester for some ideas.

The other reason for this posting is to address the concern that some of our customers have about Microsoft "not doing enough" in the area of social computing for business. As I had alluded to above, we are doing a variety of very exciting things, but rather than announce and talk about them in a random or disjointed way, we will do so in a holistic and coordinated manner at the appropriate time. For now, I'd like to offer a metaphor that has resonated well with our customers and partners alike -- that is, the corporate enterprise market is Microsoft's kitchen, and Office is the bread while SharePoint is the butter that makes everything (not just the bread) better. We are deeply committed in helping our customers and partners maximize the investments that they've made with our bread and butter. I realize that it's tempting for some of you to consider the growing number of morsels to big chunks of cheese that other vendors may be offering in our kitchen. All I ask is that rather than rushing to take a bite of that cheese, you step back and take a careful look at the bigger picture to see if there's a mousetrap setup around that cheese.

If you indeed have a critical need to get a "SharePoint Futures: Social Computing" briefing from us, please work with your Microsoft account team to coordinate it. I would love to discuss what business problem(s) you're trying to solve, and how SharePoint can be the solution.