Chat and Wikis, the future of Groupware

Via ongoing, a delicious rant about the concept of “Groupware” and why it always, always sucks. Nay, why it must suck.

“Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from ‘unchecked' to ‘checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review. Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you’d want to talk to, anyway.”

and this…

" If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. "

Oh, and Tim’s take hits a mark, also…

“Chat and wikis are not exactly what the collaborative-future visionaries of past years had in mind. But they seem to hit an awfully-big 80/20 point..”