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Jotspot Rebrands as Google Sites; Goes Directly After pbWiki and White Label Social Networks
Rob Hof at BusinessWeek is reporting that Jotspot will be relaunching tonight as "Google Sites" as part of the Apps Premier Edition offering a free version and a $50/year per user with a SLA. The Google Sites site is available now. Google acquired JotSpot in late 2006 and has basically been idling as of late. Currently the Sites login page is only allowing @jotspot.com email addresses access into the system.
Google describes Google Sites as, "Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments." It looks like these tools are meant for internal team use.
Hof believes this is a hit against Microsoft Sharepoint or IBM’s Lotus Notes. Not really a fair comparison as both of these offerings are much more robust. However, could this be a direct attack at pbWiki which is widely used for team and internal wikis? And for the sharing functions for rich media, is it an attack against the white label social networking providers including KickApps, Ning, Magnify, etc?
Rex Hammock hopes that Google Sites helps people "get" wikis. I hope people never get caught up on lingo – as long as it does what they need it to, who cares what it’s called. Rafe Needleman has some good screenshots and discussion on how Google Sites fits into the overall Google office suite.
Hof notes that company personnel may push the use of Google Sites outside of IT department approval and by the time IT gets involved, it will be too late and they will be forced to use the tool. I disagree with this but today IT has to be more proactive with forward-moving technologies than they ever have been before. The days of an AS/400 sitting in the closet are over.
The journey started at JotSpot and ended up at Google Sites… was the journey worth it?
Let me know…
http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/jotspot-reborn/
I wonder why it took so long? surely wetpaint is also not going to like this.
Darren – I didn’t include Wetpaint as I felt that they target the consumer sector whereas pbWiki goes after the business market.
Allan,
While the launch of Google Sites may look like a direct attack on PBwiki, I think it’s more of a warning shot, and one which could very well end up helping PBwiki.
Bear in mind of course that I’m an investor in and an executive at PBwiki, so I’m a bit biased!
Here’s the thing: Google is great at attracting a lot of attention, but (thus far) they tend not to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Rather, they tend to alert people to possibilities.
Omniture charges money, while Google Analytics is free. Doesn’t seem to have stopped Omniture from growing like crazy and their stock price from rising 400%.
WordPress charges money (for some things), while Blogger is free. But Toni and Matt seem to be doing very well.
Google Sites is a nice-looking product, and there are things about it I like, but it’s definitely not as polished and enterprise-ready as PBwiki, especially with the 2.0 version we’re rolling out this month. There’s a reason why PBwiki hosts 450,000 wikis, more pages than the Wikipedia, has thousands of paying customers, and is trusted by 1/3 of the Fortune 500, as well as other customers with significant deployments like Facebook, Symantec, DePaul University, and the FDA.
Whats makes Google Sites more of a warning shot at this point is that it’s only available to Google Apps users. My guesstimate is that less than 5% of PBwiki’s users also use Google Apps. So while there will be a lot of attention, it’s not that likely it will cannibalize PBwiki’s business.
In the rosy scenario, this could end up working much in the same way that we were able to take advantage of Justin.TV at Ustream. Justin and his team did a great job of making everyone aware of live video, and Ustream was the first to the party with a solution that let anyone do it. (Technically, Stickam was there first, but for a variety of reasons, was never able to attract a big mainstream audience).
Plus, Google can be a great ally in the battle against the real competition, Microsoft’s SharePoint. Sure neither Google Sites or even PBwiki can do *everything* that SharePoint does, but we think we do most of what people really care about. Google helps validate the on-demand approach versus Microsoft’s on-premise software.
It’s certainly true that Google has vast resources and super-smart people, so it doesn’t pay to take them likely or bury one’s head in the sand. But based on history, I’d say there’s a better than even chance that Google’s entry into the market ends up helping PBwiki.
I pretty much agree with you, Chris, that Google Sites has a ways to go to be a more usable product. Not bad, but not great. Where I DISAGREE with you — to the point of taking offense — is that you are hardly a “bit biased.” You have basically posted this same “Google Sites isn’t nearly as good as PBWiki” comment (with 2 or 3 variations on a theme) backed up with the SAME stats on nearly every Google Sites review I’ve seen on the web. If I read that verbatim 6th paragraph in your comment above once more on the net, I *will* toss my cookies. We get it, okay? Providing a caveat that you’re a PBWiki investor and fanboi isn’t enough — you seem to be a prolific writer, how about mixing up the content of your comments a bit more instead of repeating the same thinly-veiled PBWiki market-ese over and over??
It seems like most of the structured templates that Jotspot used to have didn’t survive the integration into Google.
Such a pity…