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About that Second “S” in SaaS – Awesome Service

pressharbor ”There is an app for that” – say the Apple commercials.  “There is a plugin for that” – was my conclusion, while lookin for the rigth tools to move the Enterprise Irregulars blog to WordPress a few months ago.  Seriously.  The WordPress ecosystem is simply amazing, things that a few years ago required messing with code are now a click away: – modern themes are no longer just pretty layouts, but perform quite a bit of processing, and whatever they don’t have – well, there is a plugin for that.:-)

Such is the power of Open Source and a thriving ecosystem. But all this openness and richness of choice comes with a price: it takes a lot of digging, testing, and even more luck to find the right ones that actually deliver what they claim without messing up your theme and other plugins.  And even if you find the right ones, they all come out with new releases from time to time, and every single update, be it WordPress itself, the theme, the plugins is a hidden trap. Things can stop mysteriously overnight – as they did over @ Enterprise Irregulars a week ago, when I was alerted that our feed was all blank. The EI blog is based on the powerful but rather complex Hybrid News Theme with 21 active plugins which work in concert to aggregate the writing of 40+ authors.  And sometimes one little wheel gets stuck – what happens next is what separates good hosts from poor ones.  Or should I say, separates simple hosts from service providers. Service, as the second S in SaaS. 🙂

Normally the choice is simple: you either use WordPress.com – free, powerful, great platform, with preset choices for themes, widgets..etc – or opt for self-hosting in the Open World – with all the power to install whatever you want, but also out in the wild alone in a complex world.  (Geez, where did I hear that last… ahh, the great  iPhone vs. Android debate, perhaps? 🙂 )   Now, back to hosts: I’ve been blessed with a smaller, but amazingly good host providing extraordinary, personalized service for five years now. Owner and jack-of-all-trades John Keegan helped my with the old (dying) Blogware platform, then through the migration of my personal blog to WordPress, and ever since – so moving EI to Pressharbor was a no-brainer.

So last Sunday (yes, a SUNDAY) I turned to John again… he dug into the problem, and soon found that a rogue plugin attached custom enclosure fields to some posts, with garbled content that Feedburner choked on, wiping out our RSS feed. John then got on Skype and held my hand step by step removing the erroneous fields, until the feed got cleared up.  Sounds easy enough… in hindsight.   It would have taken me hours / days of research and frustration to restore the lost functionality.   It’s not the first time and likely not the last I received support way beyond what can be expected of a regular web hosting company.  Help with security, performance, database tuning should be standard (is it?)  but detailed plugin-level help?  No way.  How about WordPress upgrades?  I don’t even  know what they are.  In fact I got upgraded to WP 3.0 while writing this post. Not amongst the first .. only after thorough testing did  Pressharbor upgrade all of us, centrally.  I’m lucky enough to have the best of both world – the power of Open Source and great, personalized support.  A big, capital S – the second S in Software as a Service.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Podcast: Chat With NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson

zach nelson I attended NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Partner Conference last week (see NetSuite coverage @ CloudAve) and had a chance to meet CEO Zach Nelson several times: on-stage, at dinner, and a cozy small-group chat that included several Enterprise Irregulars.  Michael Krigsman of the IT Project Failures fame  recorded the entire conversation, and although it’s an hour long, I recommend listening to it.  It’s a no-nonsense, to-the-point conversation, not a PR message.

This may just be a good time for a little backgrounder on the Enterprise Irregulars, a group I often refer to.  From Michael’s post @ ZDNet:

The Enterprise Irregulars is an invitation only group comprised of top-tier enterprise analysts, observers, industry veterans, and executives. The group consists of a loose affiliation of members who make decisions entirely on a consensus basis, without formal leadership or management.

Despite the highly informal organization structure, the Enterprise Irregulars maintains an active private discussion community and members meet periodically for briefings with vendors.

I’m a proud member of the EI, in fact I am the Editor of the Enterprise Irregulars Blog, an aggregation of (selected) member posts.  Publication of the EI Blog and my other gig,  CloudAve are sponsored by Zoho.

Now, back to the conversation – participants were  Zach Nelson, Jeff Nolan, Michael Krigsman, Ben Kepes and yours truly.  I suggest you head over to ZDNet and listen to it – well worth the time.

(Disclosure: analyst / press / blogger travel and hotel expenses were covered by NetSuite)

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Dachis Acquisition Machine Reaches the 2.0 Adoption Council

20-adoption-council Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Consultancy the Dachis Group has just acquired The 2.0 Adoption Council.

I have mixed feelings about the deal. On one hand I am happy for Susan Scrupski, fellow Enterprise Irregular and E2.0 evangelist / thought leader.

On the other hand I would have preferred to see the Council remain independent – I’ve always thought this independent, peer-to-peer nature was part of the attraction for members, and that the formula worked especially well without a heavy-weight “owner” – Susan’s role, while trying to build a for-pofit business was more a facilitator in a self-driven peer-to-peer group.

But I guess business is business, and Susan likely had good financial reasons to join Dachis.  And for being “Social Business” experts I assume Dachis will have the smarts to find a formula that will allow Susan to enjoy more than usual autonomy, and the Council to remain independent – however difficult it may be.

The Enterprise Irregulars group is abuzz with talk of the deal – incidentally this is the third Dachis acquisition affecting one of our members.  Ramana Rao hit the nail on its head:

Just sayin’ in a 2nd beer sorta way, are we now Razorfishing Social Enterprise?

Spot on! I’ve always considered the Dachis Group  (and previously nGenera)  a classical roll-up business.  This is the third generation I’m witnessing, having seen firms emerge and hit $$$ big time in the 90’s ERP era, then the Internet era, and now it’s time for Social Enterprise.  (And I suppose some players have  learned the lesson of getting out earlier this time…)

Not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just business – and in the meantime Dachis clearly has the best names now.

And now all eyes focus on Toronto 🙂

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Helpstream CEO Gone. Or is it the Company? Either Way, We Gain a Great Blogger.

You heard the good news here first, so it’s only appropriate to be the first to follow up: Bob Warfield is likely out as CEO of Helpstream, a Social CRM SaaS provider.  The company website still lists Bob as CEO, but his blog post this morning implies news not yet officially announced:

My Startup Track Record

Success.  Success.  Failure.  Success.  Failure.

That’s it, that’s my story.  It’s been my heartbeat.  I’m a Serial Entrepreneur with a 60% track record, which is comforting, except that I’m coming off my latest failure at Helpstream.  60% is way in excess of what most any VC ever gets.  It’s way better than anyone I know, in fact.  But nothing is ever really very comforting at a time like this.

There you have it – but let’s quickly add, my post is purely speculative, in fact I don’t even know if it’s management change, or the entire company… (will update when I hear details). Instead of further speculation, let me add a bit of personal touch – who I know Bob to be:  an immensely experienced software Executive with great vision, an amazing thinker, who shares a lot – as time permits.

He is a fellow member of the Enterprise Irregulars, an invitation-based small think-tank of software execs, analysts, consultants, bloggers.  The posts you see on the blog are just the tip of the iceberg: we have a lot more, often intense debates going on in a closed discussion group.  Participation is very time-consuming, but rewarding. Everyone learns in the process.  But while quite often we can only afford 2-3 liner quickies, every single contribution by Bob is a complete essay, full of learnings – I’ve often told him he should just convert his group emails into blog posts 🙂

As they say, every cloud has a silver lining – well, here’s the “good news” for us:

Fortunately, the recharge doesn’t take me long.  I get bored easily.  I start talking to people, networking, and pretty soon the Startup Energy is flowing in my veins again.  In the meanwhile, I will have time to be an active blogger once again.  This is a happy synchronicity, because I will have a lot to say.  While it’s fresh, I want to go over my latest learnings from the Helpstream experience.  It’s good therapy for me, and perhaps just a little bit helpful for you, dear reader.  I wanted to pen this initial story for the series on my first work week day of unemployment.

I’m sure it will be a fascinating series, we all will learn a lot – and Bob will no doubt be back in business soon.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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Tweet Blender Wins Over Twitter’s Own List Widget – For Now

CloudAve readers can now follow the contributing bloggers’ twitter stream in a sidebar, thanks to a cool widget called Tweet Blender.   Finding it was not easy: I combed through at least 100 plugins / widgets, all doing essentially the same: follow a person, or do keyword search.  Either or.. not both.  And definitely not a selection of users.

Tweet Blender came to the rescue (before Twitter Lists): it allows to follow any combination of users and keyword searches. Smart!   But just days after I installed it along came Twitter Lists … so the writing for Blender was on the wall.

Not until Lists got supported in widgets though.. which is what we’re seeing today.  Twitter introduced their List Widget. I quickly replaced Tweet Blender with the new widget, if only for testing at Enterprise Irregulars, another group blog I am editing, thinking it might help with a major problem I have with Twitter API limits.

Here’s the gist of the problem: Every time the widget refreshes, it eats into my API allocation – and it bites big: one API acces per user followed. Over at Enterprise Irregulars we have thirty or so authors on Twitter, so 5 refreshes and I am out of luck (and API).  But the author of Tweet Blender came up with a smart caching solution, turning all blog readers into API contributors:

As of this writing, Twitter allows only 150 connections per hour from a single IP address.
Since TweetBlender works in user’s browser, this means 150 connections from the user viewing the page on your site.
For each screen name in the list of sources there is one connection made. For hashtags and keywords, they all bunched into one search query and only 1 connection is made.
This means: if you have 30 screen names – every update makes 30 connections; if you have 30 hashtags – every refresh makes 1 connection. If you have 30 screen names AND 30 hashatags – every request makes 31 connection.
If you set TweetBlender to refresh every 10 seconds and you have 50 screen names in sources then after the 3rd refresh the user viewing the page would reach the connection limit – i.e. in 30 seconds they will be done and would have to wait for 59 minutes and 30 more seconds before fresh tweets become available.
The more screen names you have – the quicker the limit is reached.
To deal with it, caching is added. When user A gets fresh tweets in his browser they are sent to your server and stored there. When user B gets fresh tweets in his browser (against his own 150 limit) they are also updated on the server. All users that view your page keep the cache fresh.
Once user A reaches his limit TweetBlender switches to cached mode and instead of going directly to Twitter, starts getting tweets from your server. If user B is not yet at the limit then his updates will help user A see fresh content.
The more users view your page and the more evenly the traffic is spread out – the less chances of reaching the limit. All visitors to your site will keep cache up to date and help each other

An absolutely smart solution – but what if I don’t have the API problem at all?  This is what I expected to test with Twitter’s own solution.  But what disappointment…  If you look at Enterprise Irregulars, you probably see the tweet stream – I don’t.  All I see is a blank frame. Sam on Scoble’s blog.  Or Mashable. Or Brian Solis.

I’m out of Twitter API allocation (or so I assume – could not confirm yet).  But while Tweet Blender uses a cache, in fact a collaborative smart cache, Twitter’s own Widget just throws up.  Yuck.  Tweet Blender is the absolute winner.  For now.

I’m writing this post as a tribute to Kirill, Tweet Blender’s developer, also in recognition of his outstanding responsivenes. Read the Facebook threads – he investigates individual installations, comes up with bug fixes overnight – exemplary Customer Service from a one-person team.

But he has just become endangered species.  With gazillion $ in funding Twitter has the resources, and will no doubt come up with a solution to the API / caching problem.  But let’s not write the little guy off just yet:  his product still has more / better features… and I have no reason to believe he will sleep on his laurels. 🙂

Update: my assumptions just got confirmed:

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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SAP TechEd: Windows is Out. But Windows are In.

My fellow Enterprise Irregulars are at SAP’s TechEd in Berlin, Germany.  David Terrar is apparently in Windows-prison, as he observed:

Here in the Bloggers Room at SAP TechEd 2008, the Windows users (of which I am one) are consigned to one end of the room. We have to take regular abuse from the Mac fanboys. As you can see, the score is Apple Mac 8 Windows based PCs 3. In the blog world we M$ types appear to be a dying breed.

I told him he’d probably get a very different count in the keynote theater, where the real corporate folks are, who don’t have a choice – unless they all work for Citrix. smile_wink

Photo credit: David Terrar

But there’s something else strikingly obvious on this photo. Windows is out.  But Windows are in – I mean the real ones, letting daylight in.  This is something we’ll never get in the US.  I almost forgot the luxury of having windows (not the MS-kind) is quite normal in Europe.

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The Enterprise Irregulars Button Up

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.. so I’ll save you the agony of reading through 3000 words, let the photos speak for themselves:

The Enterprise Irregulars with SAP Board Member Peter Zencke

The Enterprise Irregulars with SAP CEO Henning Kagermann

The Enterprise Irregulars with Oracle President Charles Phillips

Do you see what I see? Is there a trend here? I defer further analysis to our in-house fashionistas. smile_shades

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Enterprise Bloggers, Openness and a Thriving Ecosystem

I started this post a week ago, than canned it, not wanting to be part of the “storm in a teacup“, created by Oracle’s announcement that they would open up their annual OpenWorld conference to bloggers for the first time. The software giant also actively reached out to 30 or so bloggers, including several of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars.

It appears that most EI’s will not attend, partly since Oracle does not pay for expenses, partly because there is no word about access to Executives. More important than the expense issue was the reasoning:

“We’re not picking up travel costs or expenses, sorry. This will keep you impartial. If you see me, I’ll give you a pat on the back, how’s that instead?

Ahhh…the enterprise bloggers must be a bunch of prima donnas, used to getting their full expenses paid at SAP’s annual conference and other events.. SAP “bought them” and they are biased, right? Wrong.

The reality is that unlike the press and analysts, the group bloggers are often lumped into, may of us are independents or are in small businesses, don’t have corporate expense accounts to lean on, and simply can’t afford to travel to conferences on our own. Even on a fully reimbursed trip, taking 3-4 days off business is a significant sacrifice. Of course that’s the bloggers’ side, why should Oracle care? Whose loss is it anyway?

What does SAP get for the not-so-negligible travel budget they spend on enterprise bloggers? The one thing they don’t get is bias, “loyal”, positive reviews.
Fellow irregular and ex-Gartner Vinnie Mirchandani can hardly get more critical, regularly beating up SAP on issues like pricing, maintenance, innovation (or lack of) – yet he is invited back to all SAP events. Fund Manager, former SAP investor and blogger Jason Wood is also a regular at SAP events, which certainly does not prevent him from expressing his doubts / concerns. Dennis Howlett is no exception, and the list could go on.
SAP’s recent announcement of their new hosted SMB solution, Business ByDesign is another good example. While most of the media reprinted SAP’s press release, you won’t find it anywhere in the “enterprisey” blogs: what you will find instead is independent thinking, analysis (right or wrong) and dialogue. The bloggers’ verdict was generally positive, mostly about the feature set/ technology, but several of us expressed doubt regarding execution: SAP’s market segmentation, potential self-cannibalization, ability to create mobilize a new, agile ecosystem capable to profitably execute in the new high volume/low price model, and help SAP reach their market goals.

Not exactly paid-off, loyal PR if you ask me… could it be that SAP knows something about the value of dialogue, in fact outright debate? They go the extra mile to provide bloggers with information, engage them actively. Round-table discussions with Hasso Plattner, Henning Kagermann, Leo Apotheker, Peter Zencke (did it all start with Niel’s chance encounter with SAP’s CEO?) and several other executives are highly appreciated, and believe me, it’s not one way PR-style briefing either. James ‘Redmonk” Governor says it best:

“As I have said before, you can buy my thinking, but you can’t buy my opinion.””

At SAP’s Teched 07 Conference James publicly disagreed with Peter Zencke about market segmentation, and the world did not come to an end; in fact the SAP Board Member happily continued the debate at the bloggers chat afterwards. Two weeks after the “incident” James moderated several sessions at Teched Europe, on SAP’s invitation. Don’t we all know companies where such behavior is the sure way to lose access and get yourself uninvited forever?

Bloggers are critical, opinionated, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but never dull. But there’s a bigger picture here, other than external communication. I believe it’s not coincidental that the company that understands the power of dialogue has the most thriving online community I’ve seen in enterprise software.

Two years ago, when the external “Bloggers Corner” program started the SAP Developer Network (SDN) counted close to 600K members – today it’s 900K. It’s younger sibling, the Business Process Expert (BPX) network counts 200 thousand members. Between the two, discounting overlaps, it’s fair to say 1 million members participate in SAP’s online communities. This includes blogs, forums, wikis, videos..etc. SDN+BPX is a thriving support system: over 5,500 issues are posted daily, and the average response time is 20 minutes.

I think SAP has discovered something unique: they don’t have to give the code away yet they enjoy the benefits of “Open Source-like community“. The highest rated contributors don’t have to look for projects any more, they are in high demand. SAP Ecosystem Becomes a Booming Economy – declares research firm IDC.

The Ecosystem has become an organic part of how SAP conducts business, and there is no turning back. SAP Executives are quite aware that competitors comb through the SDN / BPX entries daily, and they certainly lose some competitive edge – but there is no other way to “run” the ecosystem. The Genie is out of the bottle, and they don’t want to send him back.

The role of the ecosystem will become even more important now that SAP is more aggressively pushing into the mid-market. This is a high-volume, low-margin market, sales, deployment, support all different from what SAP traditionally knows. Successful partnering will make or break it, and apparently SAP understands it.

I’ve come a long way from the original issue of blogger participation at Oracle’s OpenWorld, and not without reason. This issue has sparked a debate, stirred up some emotions, and I don’t want people to think it’s all about greedy (or hungry) bloggers whining about not getting their expenses paid. Nor is it a SAP Good Guy, Oracle Bad Guy issue. Both companies have their own culture and will continue conducting business their own ways.

I believe Oracle’s first approach to bloggers (late or mistaken as it is) is a welcome move, and it’s good to see they are open to learn and improve:

“This is new territory for a lot of us, and personally, I’d like to hear a lot more opinions and suggestions before I support one path or another.”

Some people in Oracle had to fight for this and they should not be given a (verysmile_wink) hard time. I certainly hope the initiative will not get shut down due to the initial negative feedback. I also hope Oracle management will realize how one step leads to another and that openness actually improves business in the long run. I used SAP as the positive example, because that’s the best showcase I know, and they are pioneering in this field – but if you know any other examples for actively embracing community, please share it in comments below.

Oh, and if you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, by all means, check out Lunch 2.0 @ Oracle tomorrow.

Update (10/24): …and not a happy update, for that matter. Just as I praised SAP for “getting” social media, here’s this disturbing post from Steve Mann, VP at SAP’s Global Marketing. Apparently SAP HR wants him to remove the link to his personal blog from his corporate signature. I guess I should correct my statement: SAP gets social media … just not everyone, all the time smile_sad

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The Long Swim to SAPPHIRE

SAP’s Craig Cmehil is excited to come to Atlanta as part of the Bloggers’ Corner at SAP’s annual mega-event, SAPPHIRE. He even included the map of the Congress Center area. Nice … but Craig, you should look at another map – the one that tells you how to get there. Pay special attention to step# 35. I hope you start training soon.smile_shades

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JotSpot Google Deal – Who Wins, Why it’s Big:First Thoughts

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?smile_tongue )

(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 smile_sad… 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:

  • Joe, Graham and team for obviou$ rea$ons.
  • Google, for now they have all the pieces for a small business collaboration suite, if they are smart enough to get rid of the junk and integrate the good pieces together – something they have not done before. I’ll talk about this more a few paragraphs below.
  • Some paying JotSpot customers: Jot has had a funny pricing model, where you can start free, but if you exceed a page limit (10?) you have to upgrade. Most users probably don’t realize that because in Jot everything is a page (i.e. add an event to the Calendar, it’s a new page), 10 pages are essentially nothing, if you wanted to do anything but testing, you’d have to upgrade – until now, that is. From now on paying customers will enjoy their current level of service for free.
  • Competitors: JotSpot’s market direction has never been entirely clear; they focused on consumers and small businesses, but were present on the enterprise market, too. I think it’s fair to assume that they are out of the enterprise market at least for a while, leaving only Atlassian and Socialtext as the two serious players.

Who Loses:

  • Some JotSpot customers who’d rather pay but have their data at a company whose business model is charging for services than enjoy free service by Google whose primary business model is to know everything about you. Clearly there will be some migration from JotSpot to other wiki platforms. Update: the competition isn’t sleeping, see migration offers by Socialtext and Atlassian.
  • Me, for having half-written a post about the merits of pure wikis, Office suites and hybrids, which I can scrap now.

Who Needs to Move:

  • Some of the Office 2.0 Suites, including my friends at Zoho. This may be a surprising conclusion, but bear with me for a while, it will all be clear.

So far the balance is good, we have more winners than loserssmile_regular – 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:

  • Try to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Jot Spreadsheet page, you’ll get a warning that it does not import formulas. Well, I’m sorry, but what else is there in a spreadsheet but formulas? The previous name, Tracker was fair: it’s a table where you track lists, but not a spreadsheet.
  • Look at a Calendar page: it does not have any functionality. You cannot do group schedules, can’t even differentiate between personal and group events. It’s just a table that looks like a Calendar – reminding me the “electronic” calendars of corporate executives in the 90’s: the Word template that your secretary maintained for you and printed daily…

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. thumbs_up

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