I wrote in one of my first BigEndan entries about a number of companies that are chipping away at the Microsoft Office suite by producing online versions of each of these applications. Today, Charles pointed me to Zimbra, who will be presenting at Software 2006 next week. I watched their end user demo and it's very interesting. Not only are they providing an online set of features that compete with Outlook, they are providing direct integration with Exchange servers, supporting key features like Blackberry integration and being able to work offline (caching). More importantly though, they have a built in web services interface for mash-ups directly integrated into the platform. Take a look at the demo to see what I am talking about.
The reason I like this is that I think Microsoft is losing out on a golden opportunity to position Outlook as an application platform. There are some interesting applications that seem to have co-opted Outlook as a platform whether it was really designed for that or not. Familiar examples would be Plaxo , GoodContacts, and Salesforce.com Outlook extensions (which I now use religiously). Some more complicated integrations exist like Attensa (which i stopped using 2 days after installing it because it made my machine grind to a halt), and the Mendocino project with SAP.
But is this too little to late? A quick search of Amazon produces only a few books really oriented towards developers trying to build complete applications on top of Outlook (and a number of the reviews point to how hard this really is based on the architecture of Outlook). For those that have read my Increasing Tail blarticle, they will know my philosophy that, in the end, the platforms that win are the ones that seed the market with a killer application and then give developers the most tools to extend the value of the platform with their own niche applications and content. Out of the gates, Zimbra gets the developer part. The question is can they find the killer app that will drive their adoption?
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