Google Acquires JotSpot - What This Means for the Future

As I mentioned parenthetically above, JotSpot does have competitors. JotSpot is supposed to be aimed more at smaller businesses, while SocialText and others are trying to attract large enterprises. But does that distinction make sense when JotSpot counts companies like eBay and Intel among its clients?

So does Google's purchase of JotSpot mean companies like MindTouch and CentralDesktop will disappear? Or worse, that smaller companies offering office productivity software suites such as Zoho and ThinkFree don’t have much of a future? Well, the market is still pretty big; then again, so is Google. Is it too early to write about a “Google Effect” that scares and freezes out the rest of the competition?

It’s worth pointing out that Google’s mere entry into other areas certainly didn’t enable the search engine to take over the respective fields. Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, and many others still have plenty of clients using their email systems. Of course, many people have more than one email address. If there is a large number of people who like to use more than one calendaring system, or more than one spreadsheet, then perhaps these other companies and Google can coexist peacefully.

On a different note, though, there’s the possible lack of privacy issue, and the fact that Google often seems to end up showing ads on most of its services (Gmail is the most obvious example). As I’ve mentioned before in reviewing Google Apps for Your Domain, the implied lack of privacy from the inclusion of ads could prevent the software from being used by businesses in fields where privacy restrictions are strong and government-regulated by instruments such as HIPAA. There will still be a place for applications that can meet a stronger test of privacy than Google can.