See a demo of what JotSpot sold to Google today

Absolutely right on with the advice to Microsoft. It jives with your post on the new wiki thats Microsoft’s adding into Sharepoint (thats not even in the current release). Look at Ubuntu 6.10 with the Edgy wiki added to the OS. Its WHITE HOT. Microsoft should seriously look at a blogging engine for Sharepoint (and something like Live Writer in Office) in addition to the wiki.

hmm, will Socialtext’s Socialpoint product lead to an acquisition?

I hope the wiki market explodes… I need to do something with the dotwiki.com domain name that I registered and haven’t come up with a good use for.

The good news: I could have a Wiki for my next web site. The bad news: it will have targeted ads on it?

My Spot Got.Jot.com was in hibernation, but I just loged-on and they welcomed me back!

“Google has definitely gotten over its ‘not invented here’ syndrome with the purchase of YouTube and now JotSpot.”

List of acquisitions by Google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

I think you are quite correct Robert, this accelerates their plans around office 2.0 and small business services, while Microsoft is still caught (in the headlights) between their shareholders and innovators. Google knows this and is maximising it’s disruptive forces whilst Microsoft is weakest with it’s imminent launches of both Vista and Desktop Office products.

regards
Al

An interesting detail which leaves me wondering about the next steps is this…

A while back I got on the list for an early copy of the _locally installable_ jotspot beta. It was packaged within a VMware image, done very nicely. It was the first Windows demo product I had seen packaged this way, and it loaded itself up and ran just fine on an old win2K server.

Does that make anybody else wonder what else might be possible with this acquisition?

I have a very very small business and i have started using more and more of Google’s little tools and gotta say they are great. Good purchase IMHO and it will be interesting to see what they have in store for us.

hmmm.
let me count the code bases now…
One to run their online services, probably in a large scale VMware environment.

And maybe even the SAME codebase distributed as a _locally installable product_ also within a VMware environment, available almost immediately for any target platform that VMware runs on.

Can you say instant platform independence?
How strategically killer is _that_ move?

This was extremely informative and helpful. And I totally dig how they code their projects, i.e. Aquaman, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.

What the hell are Google’s gazillion phDs doing that all the company can do is buy other companies? When’s the last time any of their vaunted phDs actually DID anything? Seems that all they are are just props to say, “Look at how smart we are!!” Reminds me of Enron.

I have to wonder why them over socialtext which seems to have a more mature product and already has pretty good Enterprise acceptance.

Scoble, I don’t know if Google HAS a NIS.

Just to echo Dimitar – check out Google’s acquisitions.

I’d go so far as to say that MOST of Google’s interesting products over the past couple years have come squarely from acquisition and re-branding. Reporters often don’t make the connection between Google purchasing a company, and then rebranding it and giving it away for free.

I do wonder what all their employees are doing, sometimes.

Michael: oh, Google did have an NIS at one point. Can’t say they have it anymore.

From wall street’s perspective getting rid of the not invented here syndrome is great.

But there are some other things to consider

1) All successfull tech companies are based on stuff that came from inside. Nobody has been (yet) able to build a successful tech org starting with a load of cash.

2) Its very dangerous to lose the coolness in the developer and college grad world. The only in-house star – search – is not something that lends itself to job marketing. How much can you sell a ‘search dev position’ to a group of PhDs? (MSFT has the research org that probably has more ‘known cool stuff’ going on than at goog corp)

3) System integration is at least 100x harder than it appears. Google would like the new acquisitions to blend in with its own apps seamlessly. (The current google appss themlselves arent exactly integrated with each other.) Users would also have high expectations of a smooth integrates set of applications. A slip up can make the new purchase meaningless.

blogger: really? You might look into where Microsoft got DOS, which is really its first big success.

With 300,000 free users and 30,000 paying customers , JotSpot was not exactly invisible before Google stepped in.

The real news is the new dimension that Google brought in to Wikis, in their quest to help the world create, manage, and share information online.

http://ideaburger.blogspot.com

Jay, from Bangalore

Congrats!!! Podtech became the first site that managed to freeze my Firefox 2.

Google’s latest acquisition of JotSpot adds a premium hosted wiki service…

…. In this light, we wonder what the eventual effects of the once again cited Intellipedia will be for internal competition within the intelligence community.

http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2006/11/google-adds-wiki-to-blog.html