Socialtext and WikiCalc Join Forces

Posted on June 9, 2006
Filed Under Companies, Social Media, Wikis |

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Ross announced today that Socialtext and Dan Bricklin have joined forces in the market by bringing together Socialtext’s wiki solution with Dan’s WikiCalc spreadsheet.

The immediate reaction to this is no doubt that a spreadsheet in a multiuser edit mode is certainly a good thing, indeed it’s been my view that even if all Socialtext gets out of this is a better table editor (think about how many spreadsheets are used a databases) then Socialtext will have a winning hand. The ability to deploy this in a intranet environment and on mobile devices are also compelling competitive differentiators.

The idea of multi-user editing in spreadsheets is something quite hot right now but I don’t think most people appreciate how hard it is to build this kind of application. Consider for a moment the complexity of doing cell locking and journaling/rollback of changes when cells may be dependent on other cells. As you would expect from Dan Bricklin, WikiCalc is a serious engineering work that solves some very complex problems.

Socialtext also announced today that they will have an open source version of their core wiki product available in a month, and will re-release the already open source WikiCalc at the same time under a more commercially friendly open source license.

PS- In the interests of disclosure I should also point out that SAP is an investor in Socialtext and I have a role on their Board of Directors.

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