Jotspot Returns As Google Sites: Wiki-Style Collaboration
Ever since Google bought the wiki-based online application startup Jotspot in late 2006, people have been wondering if it had disappeared forever inside the bowels of the search giant. Tonight, Google's launching Google Sites …
Context & Ripple Effects
The wait ends tonight: sixteen months after Google bought wiki startup JotSpot in late 2006, signs of an imminent launch have turned into Google Sites, a wiki-style page-building and collaboration tool. The arc was easy to follow — back in September 2007, observers were already asking whether JotSpot would resurface inside Google Apps as a Google-branded wiki, and tonight's launch answers that question directly.
The competitive framing matters more than the branding. CenterNetworks' pickup flags that Sites goes straight after pbWiki and the hosted-wiki crowd, while TechCrunch notes the 16-month gestation as evidence of how long Google's acquisitions can sit dark before reappearing as free products inside its suite.
First-order effects
- Google Apps users get a native wiki-style site builder at no extra cost, closing one of the suite's most visible gaps next to Docs and Calendar.
- Standalone wiki vendors like pbWiki now compete head-on with a free product backed by Google's distribution, forcing them to justify paying for what they sell.
Second-order effects
- Hosted-collaboration vendors will likely push upmarket — enterprise permissions, integration depth, customization — rather than fight Google on basic free wiki pages.
- For Microsoft, Sites is another brick in Google Apps' case as a lightweight alternative to SharePoint-style team workspaces, tightening the pricing umbrella over the low end.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's M&A functions less as a portfolio of products than as a pipeline feeding features into the Apps suite, with acquired founders absorbed and brands retired.
- Collaboration tools are consolidating around integrated browser-based suites rather than best-of-breed single-purpose apps — a shift that pressures every independent web-app category Google decides to enter.
The trend: Independent web-based productivity apps are being absorbed into free, ad-supported platform suites, with acquisitions serving as the ingestion mechanism.