Oxite: Microsoft Launches Open Source CMS Blogging Platform, Will They Struggle like they have with Search?

It's a far cry to consider Microsoft as any sort of major player in the search market. They have straight up struggled to the point where they are paying people to use their Live Search - and people still won't use it. I wonder if they will struggle as much with Oxite, their new open source CMS blogging software that emerged out of Alpha today and now available to freely download. It also raises a question to whether Microsoft will begin taking a more open source approach and slowly stray from their propreitary model. I doubt they will ever open up their office suite of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. However, they may eventually be forced down the road with free offerings such as Zoho and Google docs, which continues to improve.

Their pitch isn't too compelling: Oxite provides you with a strong foundation you can build upon - pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting (with optional moderation), gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API (think Windows Live Writer integration made easy), web admin panel, support for Open Search format allowing users to search your site using their browser's search box, and more - so, you can spend time on designing a great experience.

The integrated search feature may appeal to people, but Acquia has already announced they're getting into the hosted search business for Drupal sites with Solr. As I mentioned earlier, Drupal has already been awarded overall best open source CMS for the past two years. This will only strengthen their position due to the added functionality and benefits that currently aren't available.

Why bother with search when there is Google? Jay Batson, CEO and Co-founder of Acquia, explained in a recent blog post that "Google solves one aspect of search: making it easy to find a site you want. But it isn't as good at helping visitors find information within a site."

Soon, Solr will be a new offering as a part of the Acquia Network that will be able to index all of the content on your site and provide faceted search. What is faceted search? Since all of the content, metadata, and taxonomy is indexed, users will be able to search by term, title, author, event, type of event, etc. Its powerful because it helps users find information more easily on your website and enhances usability.

Dries Buytaert, Co-Founder & CTO of Acquia and Founder of Drupal, further explains Acquia's goals "to provide Drupal sites with (i) faster, (ii) more scalable search solution that (iii) can work across multiple sites, that (iv) can handle broader content, (v) that offers faceted navigation and more. "

Anyway, back on the topic of Oxite...Microsoft's Erik Porter explains that the open source CMS isn't actually targeted at the end user: "Oxite is targeted at developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC. That said, if you're a devigner, you might really like Oxite too. We work well in Visual Studio Express. This is a community project. If the community decides to build this to work well for consumers down the road we won't stop it, and then Oxite would be for you."

It's already pretty easy to develop on the existing platforms. Will the fact that its targeted at developers make it even harder for Microsoft to penetrate the open source CMS market? They'll probably do better with DreamSpark, that provides their developer kits to students and young entrepreneurs for free.

After a brief conversation with Jay Batson, he chuckles and remarks, "I wish them the best of luck building a product in the community."