Connecting the dots ...
Microsoft invented (?) a new software delivery model: Software by Parachute. Apparently they blanketed the town of Willow Springs, IL with aerial droppings of the new Accounting software. If the embedded player does not work, watch the videos here and here. (hat tip: Julius Danilevsky)
Note: I have no way to verify if this is a hoax or real, but I suppose we’ll know within hours.
(Updated)
In my longer analysis of the JotSpot sale to Google I listed a group of JotSpot customers who may feel disadvantaged by the deal: those who’d rather pay to have their data at a company whose pure business model is charging for services than enjoy free service by Google whose primary business model requires dissecting/analyzing their data left and right.
I also pointed out that several competitors are offering deals to migrate these customers to their platform free or at a discount. Socialtext and Atlassian were the first to come forward with their offers, but since the previous post I heard about Central Desktop, (update: see correction in this comment by Central Desktop’s CEO), ProjectForum and I’m sure there are others. (Clearly, the wiki market is growing and sadly, I don’t know all the players). Jerry Bowles and Tom Raftery wrote more on the subject.
We all seem to have missed a point here: there is a group of customers for whom migration is not optional but a necessity: participants in the JotSpot Wiki Server beta program. Like I’ve said before, as much as I am a SaaS believer, it is not a religion, apparently the feedback from most customers is that they want their wiki behind the firewall – JotSpot’s response was the Wiki Server edition. These customers now have a rude awakening: JotSpot notified them that they would discontinue the beta program. Current customers have the right to continue using the product for the remainder of the 90-day beta period (what’s the point? 
) but there is no support, no migration plan – game over, bad luck. 
Of course JotSpot had the right to do this, these were not paying customers (yet), and a beta is a beta, after all. But a beta program is a mutual effort, and especially early on requires a lot of time and effort from the customers, so it’s clear that these customers may feel let down. While most competitive migration offers are hosted solutions, it’s this specific “betrayed” group that Atlassian goes after: they offer migration help and discounted rates on Confluence, their behind-the-firewall enterprise wiki. So let down or not, these customers may eventually be better off on a more mature, robust enterprise platform.
As a sidenote, this is the second time that JotSpot drops a product benefiting a competitor: when they discontinued JotBox, Socialtext reaped the benefits by moving those customers to their Appliance. Update: Please read the comment exchange below for correction by JotSpot.
Update (11/29): two post on how the deal affected JotSpot partners and customers:
JotSpot Got the Goldmine. Its Partners and Customers Got the Shaft.
The JotSpot Google Merger
Update (11/30) the above post, The JotSpot Google Merger is now deleted, supposedly under pressure by … (?) Read the story on TechCrunch.
This is not a particularly nice title, I know, but enough is enough. I generally like Small Business Trends , sometimes even quote their material, but I can’t help but wonder what Jack Yoest is doing there.
The first weird post I picked on was 10 Reminders for Effective Management, which technically was advice to small business owners, but it reminded me of the 80’s corporate mid-manager’s survival guides, as in “how to BS your way through your career, looking busy while doing nothing“. No kidding.
In his next piece he recommended that small businesses be run like a military unit. That shocked me again; I for one tend to believe (small) businesses are better off with a team of partners and collaborators than a military organization.
Today he writes about Small Business Business Structure. A few selec quotes:
“Companies should be designed on the ol’ fashioned hierarchical organizational chart so that praise can easily flow up. And the heart-burn can flow down”
“The best structure is a pyramid with the small business owner at the tippy top with a few direct reports. The employee wanting to bother and waste the time of the boss will have to crawl over layers of managers before getting to you, the owner.”
“Put each business function in a box. Every action and process in to a discrete description. … Put employees in a box and a label.”
“And finally, close your door.”
I’ve been long wondering if these posts are meant to be satirical, but I’m afraid they are real. He really means it. Read his posts – if for nothing else, the entertainment value. 
A few weeks ago the “wikirati” was having dinner with the Enterprise Irregulars in San Francisco, on occasion of the Office 2.0 Conference. Our gracious sponsor was Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes, and JotSpot’s Joe Kraus showed up, too. Missing from the photo is Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, who was there for the first part, a briefing for Forrester‘s Charlene Li, but left before dinner. (Hm, did Joe eat Ross’s dinner?
)
(photo credit: Dan Farber)
I heard a rumor that one of us in the group had likely gotten a few million dollars richer – and it wasn’t me 
… but Joe Kraus, having sold Jot$pot to Google. The source was credible but of course we had already heard about a Yahoo acquisition, then eBay .. so who knows, after all.
I found the timing ironic, just having come back from a Google briefing where they announced Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which left me largely unimpressed. This is what they were missing, I thought.
Today we know it’s a fact: JotSpot is part of Google. After the quick post, here are my first thoughts around who wins, and what it may mean from a user prospective.
Who Wins:
Who Loses:
Who Needs to Move:
So far the balance is good, we have more winners than losers
– now let’s look at what Google should do with JotSpot.
They have (almost) all the right pieces/features fragmented in different products, some of them overlapping though. They should kill off the weak ones and integrate the best – a gargantuan task for Google that so far hasn’t pulled off anything similar. Here’s just some of what I mean:
Google Docs & Spreadsheets:
One of the reasons I found the announcement underwhelming was that there really wasn’t a lot of innovation: two apps (Writely and Google Spreadsheets) put together in a uniform look and a file management system. It’s this very file management system that I found weak: how on earth can I work online and manage a jungle of thousands of documents in a flat, alphabetical list? JotSpot may just be the right solution.
Google Groups:
It’s rare for a mature product to go back to beta, but when Google recently did it, it was for good reason: the Groups which so far has been just a group email mechanism, became a mini community/collaborative platform, offering functionality found in collaborative editors like Writely, Zoho Writers, page cross-linking a’la wikis, file management..etc, combining all this with group email and the ability to share with a predefined group. I seriously considered it a major step forward, likely attracting previously “email-only” users to the native web-interface – and we all know why Google loves that.
JotSpot, the “hybrid” wiki:
This will be the somewhat controversial part. First of all, JotSpot is an attractive, easy-to-use wiki, and I believe that’s the value Google should keep.
Second, they’ve been playing around with the concept of being an application platform, which just never took off. The “applications” available in JotSpot are all in-house developed, despite their expectations the world has not come to develop apps on their platform. (Will this change in Google’s hands?). In JotSpot 2.0 they integrated some of the previously existing applications into user-friendly page types: Calendar, Spreadsheet, Photo ..etc, along with regular (text) wiki pages. This is what I considered Jot’s weak part. Just because a page looks like an application, it does not mean it really is:
I guess it’s clear that I am unhappy with Jot’s “application” functionality, but I like it as a wiki. In this respect I tend to agree with Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, who believes in best-of-breed (whether that’s Socialtext is another question…). Best-of-breed of everything, be it a wiki or other productivity tools. I’ve also stated that my ‘dream setup’ for corporate collaboration: is a wiki with an integrated Office 2.0 Suite. Why?
Other than its collaborative features, a wiki is a map of our logical thinking process: the cross-linked pages provide structure and narrative to our documents, one could think of it as a textual / visual extension of a directory system, resolving the problem of the flat listing of online files that represent fragments of our knowledge. Of course I am not implying that a wiki is just a fancy directory system… au contraire, the wiki is the primary work and collaboration platform, from which users occasionally invoke point applications for number crunching, presentation..etc.
Now Google has it all: they should kill the crap, and combine the JotSpot wiki, their own Office apps ( a good opportunity to dump the lousy Docs & Spreadsheets name), Calendar, Gmail, the Group email from Google Groups and have the Rolls -Royce of small business collaboration.
(Update: Dan Farber over at ZDNet is pondering the same: Is JotSpot the new foundation for Google Office?)
By now it’s probably obvious what I meant by Zoho having to make their move soon: they either need to come up with their own wiki, or team up with a wiki company. Best-of-breed is a great concept and enterprise customers can pick and match their tools on their own. For the SMB market it makes sense to be able to offer a hosted,integrated Wiki/Office solution though. So far Zoho is ahead of Google in Office 2.0, if they want to maintain that leadership, they will need a wiki one way or another.
Of course I could be way off in my speculation and Google may just have bought the team.. either way, congratulations to Joe, Graham and the JotSpot team. 
Related posts:
I’m busy writing up a JotSpot / Google piece, but since I am in the habit of coming up with silly post-acquisition names, how is this: Wireddit (WiReddit?).
So the rumors at the Office 2.0 Conference were true – JotSpot is now part of Google. (hat tip: Charlie)
This is huge, and I’ll post my first reaction soon – after breakfast. You gotta have your priorities right
Congrat’s to Joe and team!
Update: See my longer post here. Btw, I’ve “stolen” the Joogle and GSpot names from Paul Kedrosky‘s blog.
Windows Vista is now officially 2.0 compliant: it has rounded corners and the right colors. 
Btw, you can be 2.0 compliant, too: order your business cards here, like I did; rounded corners are a $20 upgrade. 
Joke apart, it’s really reassuring that the most important things are taken care of…
Update (10/31): Gee, am I glad I said it before TechCrunch 
IBM NORC – The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator. Should the embedded player not work, watch the video here.
Thanks to fellow Enterprise Irregular Thomas Otter for discovering this gem. Btw., his article is worth reading, too. 
I’ve written about how wikis can become *the* Intranet, that is not only easy to access but easy to edit by everyone, in the organization. Instead of a one-way communication channel for Management to talk (down) to employees, the wiki becomes a living, breathing, participatory communication platform.
Now there’s a new case study of how a a customer of Atlassian’s Confluence wiki is using it for customer communication, by building their entire Extranet on Confluence.
The wiki has become the Intranet+Extranet.
Debbie Landa’s rant of the month:
“Customer Service 2.0 uhm, NOT
Here’s my rant of the month. It seems like everyone is trying to get on the office 2.0 train. Clearly, any developer with some code know-how can make a product but, “servicing” the product is the challenge.
I will openly stand up and say that i’d pay a fee for a product that offers phone support. When a product that you’ve been using breaks, it sucks when you can’t get help. You’re stuck with all your documents or info in random spots and there’s nothing you can do until someone responds.
ok, i’m talking about Google, yes the dearly loved Google that i have praised for acquiring writely, our collaboration tool of choice. Google, meet customer service 2.0….yup, that’s what i’m saying. (You’d make millions if you actually had someone we could call) Why can’t we call you? Why don’t you respond to our silly forms that we spend so much time filling out…why oh why are you making us so crazy. I hate to complain, but it’s been three days and still no reply….. “
I feel the pain … been there, done that. As a user, I completely agree. But let’t look at reality, it’ simply not economically feasible to offer phone support to millions of free users. Support is costly and somebody has to pay for it.
That said, there are companies that excel in supporting their free product, but guess what, their name does not start with G* … not even with Y* … a good example is Z*. As in Zoho. I am using several of their products: they all have a “feedback” feature built right in the menu bar. Typical response time is hours or less; I’ve had 10 minutes, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced more than 2-3 hours. I seriously doubt you can ask for more with free products.
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