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Comment by icefox | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say that iStuff fills in your "missing productivity suite", more that for most people the productivity suite wasn't needed to begin with. The browsers text box goes a lot farther than people give it credit for (meta using it right now). Even within corporations once wiki's are introduced (a decade old at this point?) it feels like nearly all of the reason for "docs" to exists disappear overnight. And email is replaceable with hundreds of other solutions. After you remove those two from MS Office what is left isn't a list of applications that everyone uses all of the time. This isn't a case of early adopters either. I rarely use MS office apps and that usage pattern started more than a decade ago.

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So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny. I've worked in places that, being that tiny, still refused to setup something that helpful.

As for email--yes, there are hundreds of alternatives, but somehow we keep coming back to email, and when we need to guarantee that somebody else can communicate with us, that's what we use. I've had Skype updates break. I've had Google Chat randomly disappear or be inaccessible. I've had AIM clients (of many varieties) die on me. Email, barring the normal issues you see with it, is always there.

Businesses deploy internal wikis all the time, they just quickly get abandoned because the managers who decide they are needed don't actually use them themselves.

For email specifically referring to the plethora of server and client alternatives such as hotmail, gmail, kmail, procmail, sendmail, email on your phone, etc

Actually, there are box solutions for corporate portals (which I guess include wiki or other communication/knowledge sharing tools). They're kind of a hot topic. Business are adopting.

>So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny.

This is completely false in my experience.

1) Businesses use wikis all the time. The last 4 places I've worked at have had department wikis. This includes a University, a Mega-Bank, a family owned e-tailer, and a medium-sized consulting firm, which hits just about every size business you can have aside from "start-up".

2) Getting a wiki set up is trivial. For the large companies you request the IT side to give you a VM and an address on the intranet. For the small companies it's usually a spare box and an address on the intranet. It's dead simple.

Also I suspect you would be surprised at how much leeway managers have in choosing collaboration mediums. Email is the old standby, yes, but many managers will choose other ways to collaborate within their department. Most businesses have an IM server for internal chats as well.

I think that depends very much on which large company. Where I work, getting a wiki setup on a machine I don't control would be an absolute nightmare. We're talking conference calls, forms, requirements docs, project numbers, discussions over funding, etc... It would be horrible. It took us 2 years just to get new servers.

Let's solve that problem. How about a P2P wiki?

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