It's interesting to see this article, since when Cisco first acquired PostPath, their whole stated angle was that it was a drop-in replacement for Outlook. Perhaps they've found, as we did, that the reality of doing that isn't quite as simple as it sounds, and that also, Outlook's power is waning as consumers have moved to web-based mail with more and more corporate users doing the same (especially "email only" users):
Cisco hopes its customers will embrace the WebEx Mail browser client instead of Outlook. ...That seems odd, given that analysts like Gartner have declared that the future of collaboration is a "collaboration console" where the focus moves away from email as the center of the universe, not towards it.
Cisco Inbox, expected to be available at the end of this year, aims to make e-mail easier to organize and more relevant for collaboration. Despite enterprise adoption of corporate and public collaboration tools, e-mail continues to exert a strong gravitational pull in the workplace. Rather than fight e-mail's gravity, or keep it siloed from other collaboration tools, the goal of Cisco Inbox is to make e-mail the control center of a collaboration environment.
The article talks about all the competition Cisco has from Microsoft and their hosting providers, but didn't say anything about Google or LotusLive (or Notes/Domino on-premises). So it's an isolated look at Cisco, who seem to have realized their original game plan isn't going to work.
Link: Network Computing: Cisco Inbox Puts Outlook In Its Crosshairs >
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MarvinK | 4/23/2010 9:25:47 AM
As much as people want email to not be the center of everything, it seems like it is a very difficult habit to break. Even with other collaboration tools, it seems like a lot of people just end up setting up things like email alerts or email summaries, instead of actually using those tools directly. While that might not make it the control center, it's the part that a lot of people care about.
Cisco's original game plan wasn't going to work because they didn't have one! They seem to have bought PostPath almost as a means of laundering money. I can picture John Chambers saying "Hey, all this cash is cluttering up the place. We need to get rid of it. Find me someone to buy."
Cisco is clearly targeting the medium-and-up enterprise segment with their offerings, which is why they don't seem to consider Google a competitor. It'll be interesting to see if their view changes by this time next year.