This article talks about developers seeing Sharepoint as a development platform. But every time I see an installation out of the box that appears to be what it is. It just seemed very wide open unorganized and uncontrollable out of the box if you don't put some guidelines in place for users FIRST. Potential for many uses were there but you had to basically set up the pages and tell people how to use it as process wasn't built in. So I began to believe that its actually not a product geared towards out of the box use.
Now on the other hand I have gone through two jobs where I watched teams struggle to get a Sharepoint solution up. One didn't need Sharepoint for what they were doing at all but one of the "execs" heard the buzzword "portal" in the project title and decided that they needed to build on a portal platform. The developers constantly snarled at the level of difficulty involved in building on the platform relative to what it would take to just build the site from scratch.
So is Sharepoint a good out of the box tool or is it a good development platform? Either way sales will soar as business execs that feel they need a full portal solution to build a company golf score portal site. Not to say Sharepoint may not be a good fit for some scenarios but from what I've seen its purchased sometimes on the misconception or misuse of the word "portal".
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