Picking Through The Wiki Leaves For Meaning In The JotSpot Acquisition

Deals

from the questions,-questions,-questions dept

We’d heard from a couple of different sources a few weeks ago that Google had bought JotSpot, and were a bit surprised that it had taken this long for the company to officially announce the deal. However, from Joe Kraus’ blog post on the subject, it seems like a decent bet was that the delay had a lot to do with JotSpot needing to prepare things so that they could convert their software to Google’s architecture (something previous Google acquisition Writely has spent a lot of time on). With the announcement, JotSpot has stopped taking new registrations, so it sounds like the company did as much as they could without anyone noticing, and made the announcement so they could stop registrations for the time-being while continuing to refresh the architecture. In the meantime, though, this has created plenty of speculation and discussion on what this means for Google. It seems like some are trying to read an awful lot into this — and that may be premature. Like many Google acquisitions, it seems likely that this had a lot to do with bringing on board a small group of very smart people, rather than some big “wiki strategy.” However, it could lead to some interesting results — even if it’s not what Google has in mind. JotSpot, over the past few years, has been a big supporter of the idea of situational software — basically providing a platform for people to create quick and dirty apps that fit their needs, rather than trying to re-invent internal processes to meet with rigid big software products on the market. If JotSpot is able to pass that view of the world on to Google, it could take the company a step closer to recognizing that they need to be more of a platform company than anything else.