Paul Graham was Surprised by Google Calendar?
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.)