Dare's insightful take below, sheds light on the problems
associated with building Web 2.0 business offerings around a single
Collaborative Application feature as opposed to a coherently
integrated platform.
BTW - I am just as perplexed as Dare about Paul Graham being
blind-sided by the integration of Calendaring and Email by
Google.
Paul Graham was Surprised by Google Calendar?: "
I was just reading Paul Graham's post entitled The Kiko Affair
which talks about the
recent failure of Kiko, an AJAX web-calendaring application. I
was quite surprised to see the following sentence in Paul Graham's
post
The killer, unforseen by the Kikos and by us, was
Google Calendar's integration with Gmail. The Kikos can't very well
write their own Gmail to compete.
Integrating a calendaring application with an email application
seems pretty obvious to me especially since the most popular usage
of calendaring applications is using Outlook/Exchange to schedule
meetings in corporate environments. What's surprising to me is how
surprised people are that an idea
that failed in 1990s will turn out any differently now because
you sprinkle the AJAX magic pixie dust on it.
Kiko was a feature, not a
full-fledged online destination let alone a viable business.
There'll be a lot more entrants into the TechCrunch deadpool
that are features masquerading as companies before the 'Web 2.0'
hype cycle runs its course.
"
(Via Dare Obasanjo
aka Carnage4Life.)