Murder, Death, Kill
That’s the idea you get from reading the idea that we are in the times of “Wiki wars”. Oh…. my … god … . We will all die horrible angry deaths because a sub set of a behemoth switched Wikis. So what is this all about? There was an article on Mercury News telling all that JotSpot stole away a customer, Disney, from SocialText. Now Ross commented and Graham commented twice.
The undertone of the posts seem to be very definsive and offensive at the same time, especially Ross seems to be going out of his way to make clear that JotSpot does not have as many customers yet, isn’t open source, isn’t into the new area of doing business the social way, and so on. From Ross:_Jot may think they have won a skirmish against their leading
competitor. But really, its at the cost of their customer, and the only
harm to us is taking my time to write this post._
Emmm… what? How come this is at the cost of the customer? Why is it so important to have Disney onboard damn it? Last I tried JotSpot is a very fine Wiki indeed and I am looking forward to seeing it get out of beta. In relation to why JotSpot only has one customer, I presume that’s just because they are still in beta!
As Graham mentioned in his entry, SocialText and JotSpot have different value propositions. I highly doubt that JotSpot is really in this for a zero-sum game. The market for Wikis is huge, and I mean huge. There are an amazing number of applications out there and I myself run MediaWiki internall at the moment, just for the sake of showing that there are other options.
All in all I hope both teams will get along and not get into public fights via their blogs and this is what it seems like at the moment. It’s hard to loose a customer but that’s what its about. That’s business. Listen to your customer. Why did Disney switch? Are you missing a feature they need and does it fit your strategy? If it doesn’t then you shouldn’t go after Disney! In any case, as Ross says, this is about the cable network engineering department at Disney!!! That just shows how small the market still is and how big it can become! Now get going developing your applications in the light of what your customers want and stop fighting.