Patrick Logan is in rare form:
Reading how "Microsoft officials have characterized SharePoint as 'the killer app for XML'", I am looking for a theory to emerge in the way that perhaps continuations are beginning to form a theory around web server programs and s-expressions form a theory around manipulating XML.
SharePoint is a larger concept than continuations or s-expressions. So I would expect a larger theory, but a theory nonetheless, to associate SharePoint and XML conceptually. I did not see one emerge in this coverage of Bill Gates' keynote at a Microsoft Office conference.
Yep.
Another metric I use is how large is this codebase compared to $LARGE_PROJECT?
It all comes down to this: if you can't explain what a software project does in simple terms (either as theory or as code), then something is very wrong. Once you have the concise expression, it's still necessary to drill down to the lowest level details. But wild hype like this is a sure sign that you've found a product that (a) you want to avoid, and (b) probably won't be around in a couple of years anyway.
(belated reply)
rjbs on 2005-02-16T00:59:45
I kept meaning to say something on this...
With Microsoft, talking about projects not being around in a few years is never a safe bet. The problem is that they have a lot of flow between software products, technologies, interfaces, and random ideas.
SharePoint itself might be be around as such in a few years, and their "killer app for XML" hype is all but unfathomable, but they've thrown some good things into that SharePoint bin, and the ideas won't go away. They'll just get put in more appropriate places.
SharePoint provides collaborative authoring and annotation. It's a CMS with a wiki, approval-routed version control, and collaboratively-generated, indexed metadata. It turns your intranet website from a mouthpiece into a workplace. Or that's the goal, anwyay.
SharePoint is a framework. It lets you write tiny web widgets that can be dropped anywhere, customized, and used as objects in other development projects. Or that's the goal, anyway.
SharePoint is an "enterprise-grade" portal service, for offering all this wonderful stuff to your customers. Or that's the goal, anyway.
As it stands, SP is a total mess. MS is trying to do that collaboration thing they've been working on for years and that dashboard thing they've been working on for years, and they're shoving it into one product.
Once they get either one of these right (or, as MS tends to, Right Enough), it will be everywhere. Really, if Longhorn gets nothing right but has a reasonable amount of SharePoint's metadata and collaboration stuff built in, it will be a success. Until then, it's doomed to seem like all hype, because as you said, it can't be easily explained.
(I know I'm only replying to the (I think) accidental target of your post, but... I have a place in my hard for MS SharePoint.)
