Weblogsky: What's your bid for Kiko?

What's your bid for Kiko?

Kiko Calendar - the web site, the software, and the domain name - is for sale on ebay. Evidently the competition from Google Calendar was ... disheartening. [Link]

Justin wrote that one of the lessons he learned from Kiko was not to get distracted by side projects. It's true they burned up a lot of time working on other ideas. Perhaps if they hadn't, they'd have been so far ahead by the time Google Calendar launched that everyone would have used Kiko instead. Perhaps, but I doubt it. The killer, unforseen by the Kikos and by us, was Google Calendar's integration with Gmail. The Kikos can't very well write their own Gmail to compete.

While I don't think this case implies the party's over for web startups, it is significant in one respect. It seems to be the first example of Google benefiting from the Microsoft Office effect. In the 80s and 90s, Microsoft gradually killed off the competitors of its individual applications by making them tightly integrated. Obviously this works for web apps too.

jon posted this at 7:18 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend