Google acquired JotSpot well over a year ago, back in October 2006. Let’s recap real quickly why JotSpot decided to sell out to Google.
Why did you decide to sell the company?
We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares our vision and presents us with the world’s best environment for delivering on it.
With that said, Google has a lot of responsibility to JotSpot to help make their dreams come true.
Today, Google presents Google Sites to the world. Let’s take a quick preview of it.
That’s the homepage of Google Sites. Let’s dig into the details of what it has to offer.
Google’s latest release, “Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information — from videos to presentations — and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.”
Who is Google’s competition in the industry? I think the largest competitor that Google is going to face is Basecamp, owned by 37Signals, LLC. Basecamp has a very well established consumer base already and has a lot of brand name recognition. Google does have the upper hand, being Google ‘n all, but they will have a difficult time convincing already-existing Basecamp subscribers to make the switch. Google will, however, have a much easier time acquiring new customers via Google Apps and other methods of marketing already at their disposal.
Another, yet smaller, competitor for Google Sites is ReviewBasics.com (”RB”). RB is still young and is not nearly as advanced, as far as technology goes, as Basecamp, but they have an extremely good business model.
As a last note on competition, there are already a number of hosted project management solutions already out there. The real kicker is going to be what sets apart Google Sites from the rest of the crowd.
As a final comment on Google Sites, it is only available to Google Apps users. You must have an active Google Apps account to utilize the services of Google Sites.
Stay tuned for a follow-up review of Google Sites once we’ve been able to spend some time reviewing the functionality and use of Google Sites.
March 6th, 2008 at 4:46 am
I guess, that Google sites is a different thing than Basecamp. Basecamp is tool for managing projects, at least that’s what they say. Google Sites is a whole intranet tool. It let’s to to have a corporate site, but not manager projects. Anyway. I think people will combine using Google Sites and project management tools, like Wrike, which I actually like more than Basecamp. Besides, Wrike integrates with Gmail, so it might even be a perfect match ;)