Google Sites, more functionality than SharePoint?

Google has released additional functionality for Google Sites, adding the ability to change site structure via drag and drop.

Easier site organization with drag and drop - Official Google Docs Blog

Google Sites provides a great platform for a company intranet, extranets, team and personal sites. Many organizations are currently leveraging or trying to leverage SharePoint to provide this functionality. "SharePoint provides much more functionality than Google Sites" is a nearly universally accepted truth among IT professionals. But this is not true.

Bureaucracy is a system employed to mitigate variables in hopes of reducing complexity and increasing organizational efficiency. In a large organization it is more important that groups of activities are optimized than it is individual activities. The intent of bureaucracy is to protect the overall systems management intended in the organizational design against the natural instinct of people and business units to optimize their individual contributions. Bureaucracy is a critical component in the organization of resources to achieve and optimize results; however, as anyone who has worked in a large organization will attest, bureaucracy often achieves the exact opposite effect.

What does this have to do with SharePoint? Much of corporate IT is shrouded in impenetrable bureaucracy that was designed for a world which no longer exists. Corporate IT has become obsessed with control and largely forgotten who they work for - the business. In a control-centric IT world, SharePoint would indeed (under ideal circumstances i.e. successful implementation, governance and support) provide more functionality. However, in an enablement-centric IT environment, Google Sites becomes the clear functionality front runner. More specifically, a larger set of functions is available across a larger group of users in Google Sites vs SharePoint.

As an example, let's consider a team site with a document library, a wiki, dashboards, and a SmartForm driven workflow. This functionality is only available to an IT team in the SharePoint environment. Maybe they build it out for the business, maybe they don't. IT controls this environment. Functionality is limited to a relatively small group of people who, justly or unjustly, constrain what is available to the rest of the organization. In the Google Sites environment, this functionality is available to any user.

Yes, consumerization may have stripped away many of the bells and whistles IT's bureaucracy "requires" but it is because of this fact that more functionality is available across more users. We have seen this before. It is the exact same economics that drove the client/server architecture growth as a viable alternative to the mainframe architecture. The client/server model was only "less functional" when it was evaluated within the bureaucracy of the mainframe, but these "less functional" computers allowed for a massive expansion of availability to a larger population of users. This cycle continues.

Sometimes control is critical but we must also keep in mind that bureaucracy, static by design, systematically protects itself even after the assumptions on which it was built are no longer true. The corporate IT environment is shockingly stagnant while consumer markets continue to see tremendous innovation. This would suggest it is time to take a fresh look at our assumptions around how we define functionality across available solutions.