social computing

Engineers Without Fears points us to Chieftech’s post on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration & Social Software reported by Socialtext (included on the Quadrant as a Visionary Company, and proud thereof).

This is useful, but its problem lies in a narrow vision of what “social software” is. Roping in the oxymoronic phrase “team collaboration” is a hint as to what’s wrong. Yes, obviously teams collaborate (i.e. they work together). Yes, we’ve been trying to support that kind of explicit “socialness” for decades. But, the word “social” in “social software” means something different — it refers to the connections I have to people and intelligence at all times. I.e. not just to my explicit teams or projects. Here’s the quadrant:

Note the absence of companies moving core media and gestures like social bookmarking, tagging, collective knowledge, and so forth. Where, for example, are Connectbeam and Cogenz (disclosure: I own stock in Connectbeam) to name only two innovative companies, both strong on vision and starting to show an ability to execute?

Finally, it’s worth noting that Gartner’s quadrant identifies only Socialtext and SuiteTwo as “visionaries.” How SuiteTwo, which is a VC aggregation play, qualifies beats me. It’s positioned as an offering from SpikeSource, a company which itself originated as a VC play, and which still has a lot to prove.

On the other hand, note as well that only Microsoft and IBM are singled out for their ability to execute. How does that make sense? Well, ask yourself in what previous sea-change in the medium of computing established companies turned out to dominate? IBM in the transition to personal computing, and Microsoft in the migration to point ‘n click UIs. In this case, Gartner is showing that they are very clever indeed!