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Tony Byrne

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Jive's layoffs don't portend doom and gloom for social computing

15-Oct-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Building Business Case, Marketplace at Large, Vendor Viability & Financials, IBM Connections , Jive Social Business Software , Oracle WebCenter

I'm hearing a lot of chatter among social software cognoscenti about how the looming recession will impact the social computing industry. You can even take a survey and contribute your opinion.

There's clearly a fear that social networking and collaboration feel like a frilly extra, rather than a core enterprise requirement, and therefore first in line on the cost-chopping block. When noted social software suite vendor Jive laid off a third of its staff this week, it seemed to confirm those fears.

I'm not so sure. Future-gazing is perilous, but I don't foresee a decline in the social software space that's any steeper than we'll see in other software categories.

First, social computing is just happening in the world regardless; the only real question is whether your enterprise is electing to get out in front of it or not.

Second, I suspect that Jive's layoffs are not a canary in the coal mine for social software vendors, but rather, an indication of likely contraction across the board in IT. Recall that Jive is VC-backed and grew quickly. Lesson from the last boom and bust: grow quickly, contract quickly. Grow slowly, survive the down times. Note that Jive competitor Telligent -- having just landed its own timely VC funding -- managed to lure Lawrence Liu (SharePoint point man on social computing) from Redmond. This industry is far from moribund.

Third, I'll argue that the comprehensive suite vendors -- not just Jive, but also IBM and Oracle, each with pricey collections of social tools -- may get dinged a bit more than the point solutions suppliers focusing on the basics, like blogs and wikis. If the coming economic downturn causes enterprises to build social communities one application at a time, that could actually be A Good Thing for everyone, but especially you the customer.