Microsoft stole Henry Ford's playbook when they designed Sharepoint. That's certainly the impression I got after "personalizing" the look of a company Sharepoint workspace today. Its been a year since we migrated our SPS 1.0 document libraries to WSS 2.0 and I couldn't avoid it any longer. I'll post those ugly details later.
Customizing the look and feel of a Sharepoint workspace is damned-near impossible. And its symptomatic of Microsoft's current anything-but-cool malaise. They spit out Model T applications, each one working just fine, thank you, but with no thought whatsoever that users might want to do something CREATIVE with them. Is providing users with the capability of making their workspace look different from other workspaces threatening to Microsoft's brand? Did those who designed Sharepoint have god complexes, thinking everyone who creates a workspace must build them to look like their master workspace images? Are they WTF stupid? What's going on???
I just don't get it. The list of skinnable applications like dotText is long. Yet if I pay Microsoft $30,000 for Sharepoint Portal Server I'm locked into a few ugly ass themes, all looking pretty much the same, and damned-near impossible to create a new one to look like anything other than the default out of the box Sharepoint Workspace Template.
Gee, and Microsoft wonders why their products don't generate any buzz.