"Why do Microsoft products enjoy a monopoly on the server ...?" They don't. There's plenty, even a majority, of non-Windows servers in gov (I know, some depts

"Why do Microsoft products enjoy a monopoly on the server ...?" They don't. There's plenty, even a majority, of non-Windows servers in gov (I know, some depts are true MS shops). Sharepoint is one of those things that snuck in via the desktop. It was touted by MS as an evolution of shared folders with "Intranet" features included. If you already ran a Windows Server for fileshares, Sharepoint was "free". The initial few implementations were of extremely poor quality, even by MS standards, but SP was positioned in the MS channel as the future of MS server side application development. So all of the consultancy/sales channel jumped on the SP wagon for any custom server projects. For developers, it was a nightmare. Underneat the platform was a frankensteinian horror of bits and pieces of resurected code from many departments and projects across MS crudely bolted together with chewing gum scraped of a park bench and bits of string recovered from old fish guts. Lists (SP's core structure for file directories with exposed metadata properties) could not work reliably, the system fell over under even light load, latency was totaly unaceptable even for basic operations, files did not rountrip through the server unchanged ... Over the years MS cut it down from "the future platform for custom backoffice apps" to "out of the box Intranet with mainly cosmetic configuration options" to "cloud hosted office 365 shared folders". " Isn't security the number one priority in those spaces?" No. It's exacly like every other IT environment of comparable size. Security is considered important, but does not drive sales. Features and cost, but also available expertise from the supplier/channel partners dominates the choice. Security is covered by promises and certifications, but more often than not left to operations to patch up.