Microsoft vs the wiki

Jevon sent this link my way today about wiki’s rivaling Microsoft Office in the workplace.

A wiki in its simplest terms is a web page with a big “Edit this page” button at the top that gives (up to) any web surfer the ability to edit the page’s contents. If you’ve signed up for democamp or casecamp or Enterprise2.0 night, you’ve used a wiki. Wiki’s hold a lot of promise as shared workspaces and dynamic and responsive repositories of information such as the great wikipedia itself.

In the working world, wiki’s are quite commonly used by the likes of software developers and engineers. Interestingly though, in the rest of the world, wiki’s are used by what could be described, to a statistically reasonable degree of accuracy, as absolutely nobody at all. Why is this? Is it that engineers are more accustomed to sharing and collaborative work modes? are they just more savvy? or is it that the technology itself that has this troublesome property of seeming utterly intimidating at first only revealing its utter simplicity after you’ve had sufficient experience with it. [I have often felt that any good product in search of adoption should be the opposite – seem utterly simple at first and only reveal it’s layers of complexity and subtlety as your experience grows]. Anyway, my argument is that MSOffice really shouldn’t lose too much sleep to wiki’s as they stand.

but then, there is recent word that Microsoft itself is adopting wiki’s in it’s upcoming version of Sharepoint. Should current wiki’s be worrying about microsoft?

Now some of my friends in local the tech sphere have already been fairly dismissive to me about the Microsoft “wiki”. This on the grounds that Microsoft is offering far from a pure wiki, that the sharepoint version doesn’t even support certain fundamental and “proper” behaviors of a wiki.

The prospect, i wonder, though if these poo poo-ers have properly considered is this… perhaps that any substantial deviations from pure canonical wiki can’t help but be anything but an improvement?