All’s Fair in Love, War and Collaboration

I’m not normally a fan of marketing campaigns that seek to gain traction by running down a competitor’s offering, but a campaign by box is kind of fun. Box is a place for sharing content and ideas in an online workspace (CloudAve review here). I caught up with the team from box at the recent Enteprise 2.0 conference and was intrigued by their stand – of course they had the free pens and t-shirts giveaways that are de rigueur at events like this one, but the tone of their t-shirts was kind of interesting (see below);

Basically box are saying that Microsoft SharePoint is unnecessarily complex, prescriptive and restricted to really unlock the goodness that enterprise collaboration can bring. They’ve produced a cartoon to tell a couple of, somewhat apocryphal, stories about SharePoint;

And they’ve even go on the attack with a very physical presence – the following is a billboard on US-101 (funnily enough near the Oracle HQ) pushing their approach;

Of course their are (at least) two sides to every story and there are a bunch of people within enterprise who are adamant that they need the high level security options and audit capabilities that an “industrial grade” product like SharePoint brings.

What I like about this campaign is that it allows people in the real world to tell their stories – there’s nothing better than a neutral and independent opinion on a product. I’m really going to enjoy what real-world end-users have to say about this debate….