Ahead of the curve... again

Fascinating.  First, we hear that pundits on the blogosphere have given the name AJAX to 1997 Microsoft technologies and called it 'new.' Now some folks are talking about the basic capabilities of Windows Sharepoint Services as though they didn't happen three years ago.  (See Enterprise 2.0)

Blogs, wikis, worker-driven content in the Intranet.  Dude, Microsoft has been using these technologies, internally, for years, literally.  The product is Sharepoint, and it has been a FREE download for Windows Server 2003 almost since the day that product was released. 

The IT group I'm in uses blogs to communicate.  Nearly all of our documents, plans and specs are shared in public or semi-public collaboration sites, entirely self service, hosted through Sharepoint portal server.  In addition, there are two major Wiki sites with literally hundreds of sub-sites on each one for internal use.  (One based on FlexWiki, the other based on Sharepoint Wiki Beta).

Sharepoint is not just used in Microsoft.  It is one of the most successful server products in the line.  Once a company installs Sharepoint, it is hard to keep it from becoming a de-facto standard for collaboration, sharing, and distribution of content.  The product is unstoppable.

I guess I don't mind when two scientists reach the same conclusion from different sources.  Happens all the time.  However, reputable scientists give credit to the first one to publish their ideas.  In this case, I'd expect that folks wouldn't name products from other companies without also mentioning widely accepted products from Microsoft.