(Warning: my opinion on Intel stuff follows. I work for Intel. But this came from my brain, not theirs!)
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the press release/announcement that Intel made at the Web 2.0 summit yesterday - SuiteTwo is a collection of blog, wiki, and RSS tools and companies that Intel Capital is investing in. It’s targeted at “small and medium sized” businesses, and it’s basically a bundle of products from SocialText (wiki), SixApart (Moveable Type blogs), NewsGator (enterprise aggregation), and SimpleFeed (feed publishing). A company called SpikeSource will be somehow sewing all of these disparate packages into one.
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All of these apps cost money individually, and there will be an additional cost for the “integration” that SpikeSource will be doing. Intel has stated that they don’t intend to make any money from this software bundle directly, which makes sense, since we don’t make any of the software that’s being sold. 
The cost for companies who want to buy SuiteTwo will be $200 per year per person. That is, if I’m a company of 10 people, it will cost me $2000 per year.
I’ve been following reaction to this announcement in the blogosphere. Sentiments range from skeptical (Matthew Ingram wonders, “Is it just me, or is Intel desperate?”) to misguided (I read one post that I can’t find now, saying Intel was giving a boost to the open source movement, but none of these products are open source). Mostly, no one really knows what to think about it, because this is a paper/vapor release.
That’s right - we did a Web 1.0 Press Release about a Web 2.0 product. Everyone just regurgitates what’s in the press release and on the brochuresite, because, well, we don’t know anything else. I guess that’s what a Press Release is for, though, no? The bits aren’t even going to be ready until next year, so the best we get is screenshots on the website, and marketing speak in the press releases. In fact, the whole SuiteTwo website is basically an electronic glossy brochure. I wish we could have waited on this until we actually had something to put in people’s hands and show them.
Based on the conversations I’ve been reading and having about this, I’ve come up with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of SuiteTwo:
The Good
- The more companies and workers that start using these social web tools, the better. Or rather, the more companies that start actually providing these tools for their humans to use, the better.
- Each of these tools are great - SocialText is a great wiki. NewsGator makes terrific aggregators. SixApart’s MoveableType is a good, popular blog platform.
- Hey, it’s the thought that counts, right?
The Bad
- The tools are proprietary, not open source. Yes, they use “open standards”, like RSS, etc., so it shouldn’t be too hard to get your data out if you decide to jump ship, but not being open source means you’re at the mercy of the developers when it comes to adding new features or customizations. No getting under the hood. Want custom support? It’ll cost ya.
- It’s expensive. None of these tools are free, and there’s an extra cost being tacked on for SpikeSource to do the “integration”. $200 per year per user is a LOT of money for any business, especially when…
- There are many great, free, open source alternatives. Want a wiki? Why pay for SocialText when MediaWiki is free and super easy to use? (Check out wikimatrix.org for comparison of all wiki apps - there’s bound to be one that meets your needs) Want blogs? Why not use WordPress MultiUser? Want fancy, pretty feeds and stats? How about Feedburner? How are you going to tie it all together? Find a geek in your company who lives the stuff. He’s already set these things up, played with them inside and out, and would be happy to get them going inside the firewall. Heck, he may have already done it, and you just don’t know about it.
The Ugly
- I couldn’t find an RSS feed ANYWHERE on the SuiteTwo web site. For shame! Robert Scoble once said that anyone who launched a marketing web site without an RSS feed should be fired. How are we supposed to take SuiteTwo, which is all about Web 2.0 and RSS, seriously, when they don’t even offer a feed of their own?! Seriously, guys, this was a huge mistake.
- The name, while clever, violates Josh’s First Rule of Naming. That is, never pick a name that you have to spell out every time you speak it, or have to explain how to pronounce every time you write it. Not so bad on the latter, but it fails the former. How much time are you going to waste saying “No, it’s S - U - I - T - E - T - W - O” when you’re talking to someone about this?
- I wonder if Intel will “dogfood” this - implement it internally? At $200 per head per year, times about 100,000 people, that’s about $20 million per year. Maybe we’d get a discount, but still. And it would be competing with existing, well-entrenched tools. At any rate, I’d love to get my hands on the bits, and try them out. Maybe there’s something cool and magical about how it all works together - if so, I’ll be the first to start cheerleading for it!
I’m not trying to be harsh. I know the folks at SocialText, NewsGator, and SixApart. They’re super nice, super smart people. And the Intel folks I’ve talked to about this are great, too. I’m not trying to bash on this idea, because the idea has potential. But you’re executing on it in the old fashioned Web 1.0 way. No bits to put in people’s hands (would Apple ever make a Press Release-style product announcement without something to show?). Web site straight out of 1999. Trying to ride on the buzz of the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference instead of generating your own. Lots of buzzwords and marketspeak.
Do you know what all of that feels like to those of us who actually get excited about arcane, geeky ideas like having company-wide blogs and wikis? It feels like a big company trying to embed their marketing axe in our heads, and manipulate us into convincing our bosses to spend the money on these tools. Thanks, but no thanks.
First, make a great product. The, let me get my hands on the software, try it out, ask questions (and get answers), and THEN I’ll decide. If it’s good, then I’ll be telling all my geek/influential friends about it. If it’s not, well, I’ll probably tell them that, too, or worse - just not talk about it at all. THAT’s how marketing should work in “Web 2.0″. The jury’s out until then.
TinyScreenfuls Feed (this blog)
Phew… there’s a lot to respond to here, but now that Web 2.0 Summit is over, there’s finally some time to think. First, I think the title of your post and the intro belies the fact that you were going into this as a skeptic. I’m as big a “web 2.0″ skeptic as anybody, but I’d encourage you to judge this project/product on its merits, and not based on your skimming of a website.
You describe sentiments as ranging “from skeptical … to misguided”. I just found a huge number of positive press mentions, many of which I linked to on the Movable Type News blog, just by doing a Google News search for “SuiteTwo”. Seems unfair to not include “positive” or even “effusive” in your range of reactions, if you want to be balanced.
In regard to open source, Movable Type has substantial portions of the application which have been released under open source licenses, and we at Six Apart have created an enormous amount of open source infrastructure in general, including the memory caching platform behind LiveJournal and Vox, which is also used by Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, and many other sites. So I’d argue that something that helps us *does* benefit the open source community. SocialText, of course, has a completely open source version of their core wiki product, which deserves not to be dismissed.
I do agree it’s a shame to have to talk about a product that’s not released yet, that people can’t evaluate for themselves. But the truth is, for this kind of product to be a success, distribution partners, sales channels, systems integrators, and especially the enterprise/business customers need a *lot* of lead time to start evaluating a product and researching their options. That’s not to mention that, sorry to say it, a traditional press release and an enormous amount of media coverage is actually an extremely effective way to help make a good product successful. Just putting nice technologies together is not enough to encourage adoption. If we “waited on this until we actually had something to put in people’s hands and show them”, we’d be just *starting* a multi-month sales cycle at the point when the first version of the suite is already complete. That’s just silly and inefficient — shouldn’t developers know about a new set of instructions on a chip before it comes out in a PC?
We did scope out the inclusion of a blog and RSS feed in the first version of the site and should have one soon. I don’t think it’s a critical need, to be candid, because if this audience already knew the value of RSS feeds, we wouldn’t have to explain SuiteTwo to them. The truth is, these technologies have enormous business benefits (they let employees pooh-pooh new efforts in public! ;)) but most companies don’t know about them yet. I’d want to put an email alert notification in place before an RSS feed, because this audience uses email today but is mostly not yet using feeds.
Not everybody’s as deep into this stuff as us geeks.
And then, for some of the specifics: “not being open source means you’re at the mercy of the developers when it comes to adding new features or customizations” Not true. All of the platforms in the suite support customization through plugins, extensions, and open APIs. In the Movable Type community (i’m using the example I know best), most plugins are released under open source licenses, and we allow customization of the code of the core application itself. And hey, here’s SocialText on SourceForge.
“None of these tools are free” — no software is free for a business. You pay in evaluation, testing, deployment, training, support, upgrades, and security regardless of what license the software is released under. I’ve worked in IT purchasing, so I know exactly how those spreadsheets are put together — $200/year/user is *nothing* compared to the total cost of deploying any solution, especially when that includes support and integration and a number of other benefits.
“There are many great, free, open source alternatives.” SocialText *has* a totally free, open source version. There’s a free version of MT. You can use the consumer version of NewsGator’s web aggregator for free. That doesn’t mean that any of those scenarios are ready for business deployment. You’re confusing “works for me” with “is effective for deployment to 10,000 desktops”.
And I’ve been that geek that lashes everything together in his free time. Let’s say you’re that guy: You want to get called at midnight on a weekend because a project team that’s on a deadline can’t get to a post on their wiki? I didn’t think so. This isn’t a hobby — these are business tools. It’d be madness to say “well, just let a geek in the back deploy your phone system and email servers, and see how it works out”.
“Robert Scoble once said that anyone who launched a marketing web site without an RSS feed should be fired.” Robert Scoble was wrong. Communication should always be appropriate to the audience for whom it’s intended, and most technology decision makers in companies of any large size aren’t spending their day reading a whole bunch of RSS feeds. “How are we supposed to take SuiteTwo, which is all about Web 2.0 and RSS, seriously, when they don’t even offer a feed of their own?!” How are we supposed to take your feedback seriously when you’re suggesting forcing a random person in your organization to become IT support for a line-of-business application?
Don’t drink the kool-aid here. I’ve got “evangelist” in my title, too, but I’m not under the delusion that blogging is a religion.
“The name, while clever, violates Josh’s First Rule of Naming.” Should I suggest a rule about naming things after oneself? I spoke to at least a few hundred people about SuiteTwo already this week, and there was pretty much zero confusion.
As far as cost of an internal Intel deployment, I’d seriously doubt every single member of the 100,000 person organization would need a license. The good news, if you’re interested in seeing how Intel works with Movable Type Enterprise, the IT@Intel blog is already running on it, as we outlined on our site.
I think you need to step back a bit and realize you’ve got nothing to prove by dissing an Intel project while working at Intel. A fair assessment of the SuiteTwo project would make the few legitimate criticisms you offer seem a lot more valid. “would Apple ever make a Press Release-style product announcement without something to show?” Ahem, iTV anyone? 3ghz PowerPC processors?
There are tons more examples, and I think you reveal a disconnect by even using Apple as an example. Apple’s partners never know when their entire product lines are going to be obsolete; A color change, or a modification to the iPod dock connector, and Belkin or Bose are up a creek without a paddle. That might fly for an MP3 player that a kid wants for christmas, but that’s a silly bar to set for an business-grade software platform.
Do you know what all of that feels like to those of us who actually get excited about arcane, geeky ideas like having company-wide blogs and wikis? It feels like a big company trying to embed their marketing axe in our heads, and manipulate us into convincing our bosses to spend the money on these tools. Thanks, but no thanks.
I know exactly what it feels like to those of us who are like that: I’ve worked on spreading the word about blogs in business all day every day for four years. I’ve literally spoken to tens of thousands of people about this topic in person all over the world. We’ll use every tool at our disposal to get new people blogging, and it’s not going to happen simply by us blogging about it and letting geeks download the code. It’s going to take every tactic we have to cajole companies, kicking and screaming, into using these tools. And it’s too important a cause to risk not using traditional media and the channels that are familiar to these audiences.
If it’s good, then I’ll be telling all my geek/influential friends about it. If it’s not, well, I’ll probably tell them that, too, or worse - just not talk about it at all. THAT’s how marketing should work in “Web 2.0?
I think we all overestimate the influence of our friends. Barely more than half the people in the U.S. use Google. Statistically speaking, zero of the target audience uses Flickr, and less than 10% of them have even heard of it. (The Flickr team are friends of mine, and I love them, but it’s true.) They’re not yet reading feeds, and they’re mostly familiar with blogs as “that thing my kid does on MySpace where she posts our home address”, thanks to Dateline NBC’s scare stories.
It would do us all a service to remember that we’re privileged to get to use these technologies every day, and frankly I think there’s nothing more Web 1.0 than being so far up our own asses that we assume everyone 1. learns about technology the same way we do and 2. is even interested in using new technologies.
Whatever we can do to make SuiteTwo seem safe, reasonable, and easy to adopt is going to help companies communicate better with their employees and their customers. I think that makes companies better citizens in the world. And that’s important enough that we should focus on how to do that most effectively, whether those tactics are “cool” or not.
Oh, I forgot to mention — those full-content RSS feeds from I, Cringley? That’s Movable Type, too.
Anil, very well said. We are indeed very lucky that we have access to such things. Imagine those in the world that cannot even blog! We take much for granted and it is not up to our ever higher exacting standards right out of the gate. Realistically, what, if anything, these days, is a perfect product, upon introduction? If we were honest, not much. All takes tweaking and workmanship to get to the ultimate version of what is a marketable product.
What he said.