Dion at Ajaxian writes that "the future isn't with emailing Word attachments". Nor will it stop at online document sharing. Following the release of Google Docs & Spreadsheets earlier this month, Google announced today that it's acquired JotSpot , a wiki company launched in 2004 by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer. JotSpot's website suggests that its wiki be integrated with Google Docs, Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Groups to form one big productivity and collaboration suite.
Joe Kraus' "we've joined Google" post appeared on Google's official blog less than 24 hours after SocialText's press release on SocialPoint went out. SocialPoint = SocialText's wiki running on SharePoint. CEO Ross Mayfield says the integration will help sell more seats of both products.
ZDNet's Dan Farber says Microsoft is making nice, calling SocialPoint a best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 application. And David Berlind writes that
To match Google, [Microsoft] may have to figure out how to acquire or bring into the Microsoft-fold something that's culturally incompatible with Microsoft's primary mode of operation. "Acquiring" open source and taking it "closed" is very difficult to do. Moving forward, my sense is that Google, Yahoo and others will force Microsoft to not only consider the acquisition of open source-oriented companies and as a result, but also to leave them as open-source oriented properties. In other words, expect Microsoft to be more of an open source company down the road.
If you read this side by side with point #2 on Ross' SocialPoint post, doesn't it sound like there might be some potential for, um, closer collaboration? Especially now that Ross has "changed his attitude towards the convicted monopolist" and written about the mutual profit motive?
I believe that our Open Source solutions cooperating with Microsoft may grow the Open Source community as a whole. Most people won't see this in Microsoft's best interest. I do. Some people won't see this in Open Source's best interest. I do.
By the way, back in May, TechCrunch speculated on a possible deal between Yahoo! and JotSpot. Now that Google's done that deal, might Atlassian be an option? Susan Scrupski writes that Confluence has over 100,000 users and possibly $15 million in annual revenue. On the other hand, maybe Atlassian's customer base (which includes half of the Fortune 100) is too enterprise-oriented for Yahoo! And as Don from Ajaxian says, JIRA would be a better match with code.google.com.
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