>Consider your typical Chief Information Officer in the pre-Cloud era: for various reasons she has bought in to some aspect of the Microsoft stack (likely Exchange). So, in order to support Exchange, the CIO must obviously buy Windows Server. And Windows Server includes Active Directory, so obviously that will be the identity service. However, now that the CIO has parts of the Microsoft stack in place, she is likely to be much more inclined to go with other Microsoft products as well, whether that be SQL Server, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, etc. True, the Microsoft product may not always be the best in a vacuum, but no CIO operates in a vacuum: maintenance and service costs are a huge concern, and there is a lot to be gained by buying from fewer vendors rather than more. In fact, much of Microsoft’s growth over the last 15 years can be traced to Ballmer’s cleverness in exploiting this advantage through both new products and also new pricing and licensing agreements that heavily incentivized Microsoft customers to buy ever more from the company.
I once worked for a very big company that decided to use Microsoft SharePoint to unify all the forms of communication that had developed over the years. They hired a Microsoft consultant to help them out and I was basically her assistant during the entire process. This consultant was pretty expensive.
What I remember most is that she acted more like a salesperson than an actual help at getting SharePoint working in the company. She'd relentlessly suggest features or solutions that happened to require a newer version SharePoint, and obviously there were all sorts of other Microsoft solutions that would ease the company's pains.
It seems like a very clever approach, but I couldn't help but hate the role she had, and it made me want to avoid Microsoft at all cost... or at least until I'm not the one affected by the decisions she pushed the company towards, I guess.
Microsoft is rapidly moving away from this type of situation. You buy 365, always have the latest version, have nothing on prem to maintain, can beta test everything in the cloud before general release, AND most importantly, youre not getting an empty infrastructure/platform that isnt useful out of the box.
Sharepoint by definition required an architect or someone to flesh it out. Microsoft is taking on that role of turning a skeleton into a body.
Their pricing is more like (a made up example): Exchange $2, Sharepoint $2, Skype $2, OR Everything + BI, Teams, Groups, Planner, Flow, PowerApps and whatever else they make/dreamup this week for $3. It makes no sense to buy 2 things from Microsoft over the bundle. The pricing is even more apparent when you look at their mobile management offerings, and its cheaper to buy 4 products than it is to buy 2. So now that you are "getting Teams and Planner for free" you might as well try using them before shelling out for Slack and Trello. Plus compliance worries are handled.
Also, it's fairly easy to "leave exchange and sharepoint document libraries" if your setup and permissions arent complicated. Microsoft is pulling an Apple, and abstracting the filesystem away so you use Planner directly to store planning data, in a proprietary, non exportable format, instead of having a storage locker to store files. These "freebies" exist to make it more painful to leave the ecosystem once you have them up and working. That said i am guessing most companies dont have a ton of buyin to things like Planner or PowerBI yet.
>Consider your typical Chief Information Officer in the pre-Cloud era: for various reasons she has bought in to some aspect of the Microsoft stack (likely Exchange). So, in order to support Exchange, the CIO must obviously buy Windows Server. And Windows Server includes Active Directory, so obviously that will be the identity service. However, now that the CIO has parts of the Microsoft stack in place, she is likely to be much more inclined to go with other Microsoft products as well, whether that be SQL Server, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, etc. True, the Microsoft product may not always be the best in a vacuum, but no CIO operates in a vacuum: maintenance and service costs are a huge concern, and there is a lot to be gained by buying from fewer vendors rather than more. In fact, much of Microsoft’s growth over the last 15 years can be traced to Ballmer’s cleverness in exploiting this advantage through both new products and also new pricing and licensing agreements that heavily incentivized Microsoft customers to buy ever more from the company.