Strategic Architect Forum

More later, but I thought I would share my Q and Bill Gates' A:

Me: We've seen an explosion in the social Web aspects of the consumer space with Facebook and MySpace, but we've seen very little adoption of this technology by the professional information worker. Do you see that occurring, and if so, how do you see that changing your strategy around Office and the collaboration tools en masse?

BILL GATES: Well, this is a fascinating question. We actually have dozens of customers who have taken SharePoint and created something virtually the same as Facebook using SharePoint. It either catches on in a company or it doesn't. It's kind of lonely if you go up to your page -- it's called the SharePoint Personal Page -- and nobody has come, nobody has said they want to link up to you. That happens to you enough times, you know, the thing kind of goes into disuse.

The idea of these social networks, there's nothing really new. I mean, personal homepages were around for a long time. There are challenges that these things face in terms of how overloaded they get, and do they really understand relationships or not. If they don't model the various relationships well, which I claim none of them do, then they have a tendency to burn out.

I have 5,000 friends requests on my Facebook page. I just don't have time in the day to accept or not accept those people. I mean, the thing just does not work for me. So, I apologize if I didn't accept any of your friends requests, but I'm just closed for business until something comes along with a better model for how that works.

You know, if you're a kid, are your parents your friend or not your friend? Well, how can you be hip and talk about what happened at the party last night if your parents are on? But if you don't put your parents on, they might wonder what that means. They might find some other way to get access.

So, yes, people want to share, but, no, people don't want to share, and getting the right type of models in this for software is very interesting.

There are some things like LinkedIn that have gotten some level of activity, and the SharePoint personal pages. Certainly in the next round of SharePoint we're going to make it so if you want to do a Facebook like thing, you just pick the template, you don't even have to write any lines of code. If you're interested in doing it today, we can share the templates of the customers who have done that. I highly recommend it. I think it does lead to some very positive dynamics.

Most things you see on the consumer Web, whether it's wikis or blogs, we are now -- you know, what we do in SharePoint is we say, yes, you can have the flexibility and power of those things, but in an environment where there is a notion of protection and boundaries, and where the name space is connected up to your Active Directory, so the groups and permissions that you're setting up there are exactly what are reflected into this business community. If you want documents to be rights protected, then that works very well.

So, it's easy to go overboard when these things kind of explode, and say, oh, man, we all just need to do something like that. There is a fair bit of activity that is around those things that is not necessarily enhancing the business.

Then again, at the core of it in terms of what people's interests are, what they work on, if it's done right, particularly if you get an organization of a large size and multiple locations, I think it can be incredibly beneficial. We've seen the SharePoint personal page feature catch on and be a pretty important tool inside Microsoft.