Back in January of this year, Ross Mayfield (CEO, Socialtext) responded to the press resulting from a customer (Disney) opting for a competitor's product. Ross is very much a 'high road' competitor and posted this nice big picture view of the evolving wiki landscape. I think his comments are even more relevant now and make reference to the huge enterprise market potential of wikis:
Our vision is to fulfill the wiki mission by keeping it simple and accessible for all. Our market is the 400 million business users of email who reject the complexity of enterprise systems and simply want the benefits of group productivity solutions. One day there will be a wiki server next to every Exchange server and people will discover the power of working openly and socially.
My contention is that in addition to this huge enterprise market, there is an equally large public market of civic organizations that ISPs and marketers seem to be unaware of. My next post will address that.
I'm glad I found your blog, we appear to be working on the same project when it comes to wiki's and collaboration or productivity. Ross Mayfield appears to have a great vision of where wiki's will or could go. In fact, after all the research we have settled on giving SocialText a pilot run to see how it goes. My biggest focus is on creating a process for small businesses to use wiki's and not get bogged down. Yes, wiki's grow organically and that's awesome but there must be a guiding charter on how to get the most out of wiki's for business use. Well, that's what I'm working on.
Keep up the posts, good stuff
~LaBoheme
http://sensoryproject.typepad.com/igottaaskwhy
Posted by: sensory.project | 12/08/2005 at 05:22 PM
LaBoheme - thanks for the kind words.
A guiding charter? ... umm, not really, although that is what I hope to accomplish with this blog.
Good luck with your pilot and I look forward to hearing back from you - let us know how you're doing!
Posted by: kris | 12/08/2005 at 09:41 PM