Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Google: Turning weaknesses into strengths (Jotspot)

October 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Google: Turning weaknesses into strengths (Jotspot)

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Google has been in the market lately for features that could never make standalone companies. Jotspot is the latest find. By itself, JotSpot would have struggled to make a viable business - enterprises buy products with wikis as features (like content management systems or office productivity suites), and consumers aren't going to pay enough to fund a wiki company.

But with this acquisition, Google has really pushed its "office 2.0" agenda much further ahead. Alone, JotSpot was just an interesting curiosity. With Google's other cloud-based applications, it starts to look like an interesting application.

Thus, in Innovator's Dilemma fashion, the original innovator, Microsoft (or, more appropriately, WordPerfect/Novell) has been supplanted by the upstart, Google. Not financially. Not yet. But mindshare is on Google's side on this one.

It will be intriguing to see if Office Live will prove an effective counterattack. My bet is that it won't, over time, because Microsoft is too wedded to its Office revenue stream. Maybe the fact that Google mostly fails to sell anything except advertising, which advertising has proven weak for everything except its core search business, will work to its advantage on this one. Just as Red Hat was forced to sell service instead of bits because it couldn't do otherwise, so, too, might Google be forced to succeed in the office 2.0 world precisely because of its inability to monetize it in traditional ways.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting piece from Bill Wise on how Google uses the buzz from failed experiments to drive its core search business.

Posted by Matt Asay on October 31, 2006 01:42 PM

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