"Thanks Oliver - great comment. I agree that IBM page is not impressive in the least, and the timeframe question for the big players is the real question. All have a placeholder for sure because they have to, but many lack commitment - in the ham & eggs analogy, they are the eggs. This includes Sharepoint despite the civil defense force you mention. The Sharepoint story seems to their typical play - rather than just have a placeholder, they deliberately seed something inside their customers into which will grow whatever needs to grow to dominate that part of the customer infrastructure over whatever timeframe it takes them to figure it out. I agree with your comment - we are seeing the natural evolution in market development in play here - from Education to Custom Solution development to more packaged Applications / Solutions. We're probably in between the Education and Custom Solution development stage, with collaborative processes now being defined in some enterprises / industries,..." - Brian Magierski
"Fred - who are jon & ross, and what firm did they start?
Jeff - interesting thought. The acquisition corp would seem to need to have an underlying platform for simplifying the connective tissue between the various services it buys (single sign on, etc) but maybe not much more than that to start. The earn-outs are key for sure, or some other dividend paying ownership structure in the service purchased." - Brian Magierski
"Fred - who are jon & ross, and what firm did they start?
Jeff - interesting thought. The acquisition corp would seem to need to have an underlying platform for simplifying the connective tissue between the various services it buys (single sign on, etc) but maybe not much more than that to start. The earn-outs are key for sure, or some other dividend paying ownership structure in the service purchased." - Brian Magierski
