Social PLM and Email Lock-in?

December 9, 2010

I found the following WSJ Pool interesting. Will you use your Facebook’s email service as you primary email? You can read about this poll in the following eWeek article. Navigate to this link to read discussion and vote. At the time I voted the result was pretty clear- email is one the most successful lock-in application.

The results of this vote made me think again about the future of collaboration and social PLM. Recently, I wrote about Facebook’s message service – Social PLM Inbox and Changing Paradigms. My conclusion back few weeks ago was clear. Social PLM is taking on email. This is a very ambitious take. The WSJ pool made it clear – email is sticky and despite the huge success of Facebook is still here.

How To Break Email Lock-in?
I was thinking about how social PLM can break email lock-in for the people using email in design collaboration. The social link is a possible ice-breaker. People value ease of use and data connections. The main place where email gets crazy is when you need to connect people’s communication and relevant CAD files. I can see an attempt of companies PLM space to make it happen. PTC Social Link, Dassault Social Innovation, Vuuch. This is my short list of trials.

What is my conclusion? To break an email lock-in can be a big deal. Will it happen or not? People are asking this question all the time. You need to think about really sticky application to make it happen. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

GSA and How to Reduce PLM Collaboration Cost?

December 9, 2010

Navigate your browser to the following link. GSA is moving to Google Apps. According to the Google blog, US GSA becomes a first US federal organization is moving their 17’000 employees to start using Google Apps for email and document collaboration. Here is the quote:

By making this switch, GSA will benefit in a number of ways. Modern email and collaboration tools will help make employees more efficient and effective. Google Apps will bring GSA a continual stream of new and innovative features, helping the agency keep pace with advances in technology in the years ahead. And taxpayers will benefit too—by reducing the burden of in-house maintenance and eliminating the need to replace hardware to host its email systems, GSA expects to lower costs by 50 percent over the next five years.

Why I think it is important? The collaboration cost is high. Time burden during the work on emails and other non-efficient collaboration tools is enormous. Google is making a point about how possible people can save some money out of collaboration. The same blog posts states move to Google will lower cost by 50%. The amount of inefficient emails in manufacturing company is skyrocketing. Thinking about a potential combination of Google Spreadsheets, Emails with some engineering and manufacturing stuff can make sense.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

[tag PLM, Collaboration, Google, GSA]

6 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

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