Indie 2.0

Zoli’s Blog reports this rumor, without a lot of substantiation. If it’s true, it’s big, as whatever wiki Google comes out with will have a major impact on the knowledge management and enterprise wiki space.

The Googlized Jotspot could potentially take some steam out of Sharepoint (and the prediction by Forrester that SharePoint will continue to steamroll the enterprise Web 2.0 market in 2008). And this would be good IMHO, as it seems to me Sharepoint has tacked on wiki, blog and social networking as an afterthought (as the Forrester predictions admit)–trying to make an old dog do new tricks.

Sharepoint (when I last encountered it last year when I was working at adidas) was being pitched as a tool for “knowledge management”. But “knowledge management” is part of the problem, not part of the solution, or, as Zoli eloquently put it in a post in his blog 12 months ago:

The real story is not about a better tool, but being able to work differently. When wikis are truly embraced in the enterprise, they don’t just make KM easier; they put it out of it’s misery. Yes, that’s right, the wiki is the end of Knowledge Management as we know it: the after-the-fact collection, organization and redistribution of knowledge objects.

The wiki becomes the primary platform to conduct work, the fabric of everyday business, where people create, collaborate, and in the process capture information. While not a Knowledge Management tool, the wiki resolves the KM-problem as a by-product.

And, thus, I believe, Microsoft will never push this shift to a different way of working with wikis–they make way too much money from licenses for the very products (MS Office apps + MSOutlook) that have all our collective knowledge locked up in (essentially) “read only” Word and Powerpoint silos being zapped point-to-point by the millions via email. So I’m rooting for the Google Jotspot to shake things up…