21 September 2008

You can no longer Jabber freely

I love working with the tools that chaps in garages or bedrooms have worked on which are simple and elegant solutions to pressing needs. That said I am not a huge fan of the long tail model. The assumption that we can all make money in the 1-2% forgets one thing. We still have to compete with the scarce resources of time and total cash.

Jabber was one such tool. Simple easy elegant and free. Or pay for a site license and you can install it yourself. Simple - elegant - independent - private messaging. Well scratch the middle word from that list. Cisco bought them. So far Cisco has ended up buying many of the applications that I used to use. Webex (who in turn had already bought Intranets), Linksys (the ubiquitous company for SOHO networking) etc etc, now they have acquired Jabber.

So staying one step ahead of these big boys and keeping independent is getting harder. There are several tools for web demos. Actually there are few that I like but I keep looking. I love 37Signals (thanks to Professor Hrush for introducing me to that one). So I will probably stick with using Skype as my preferred "presence"
provider. It has become the indispensable tool for our business and personal multi channel communication services. I keep a single machine where I dont load MS stuff - using Open Office etc. Every now and then I go and play with it to see if it can compete with the Office Juggernaut. It doesn't but for others who just need simple stuff this is not bad. (Shhh dont tell anyone but I also have a MAC)

Cheers

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