Dear Robin, I am indeed very happy with the focus on Kolabora.com, and most of the time it almost frightens me to see a lot of my own views reflected in many of your articles and reviews. :-)
I indeed appreciate your efforts to further the access to these online collaboration technologies, while staying focused on providing objective information, giving access to free try-outs, and keeping a good eye on user-friendliness and transparent, cost-effective pricing models.

But there is one area, which I think is taken too lightly, and in which I would enjoy to see a likewise focused stand from Kolabora.com: x-platform support (compatibility of tools with all operating systems and computer types available out there - cross-platform support).

While for most developers of collaboration tools, x-platform support is the very last thing to consider, for individuals arranging online meetings and events, it is often the very first thing to look for.

It is a strange world indeed.

How can a company start developing a tool for collaboration with the full intent to exclude certain users due to their choice of platform? Tools for collaboration ought to secure a common ground for collaboration, not as a first step exclude people.
In fact, it appears to me, that developers of these tools act as if the tools were technologies designed for individual private tasks on whatever computer platform they happen to operate. This approach makes sense in the area of Personal Computing, but it does not make sense in the area of Collaborative Computing.

When developers of collaborative tools want to be user-sensitive, and set up a web-survey asking for which new features users want, they in fact loose some crucial points.
The importance of any feature in collaborative tools cannot be simply judged by the choice of each potential user, as the importance of a feature is as often determined by the context, common consensus in the group, and by meeting managers etc.
Likewise it is not each individual that choose his or her tool to use (open standards would make better way for this), but rather it is the context, common consensus, meeting managers that strongly determine it.
So, while I would suppose that in a vendor survey asking users about new feature requests, x-platform support would end up quite far down on the list, it is the well known fact that at any online conference, if you support only the Windows platform, you may loose out on 5 to 10% of your potential attendees.

This element by itself would be a compelling enough reason for any future-looking vendor to understand that placing cross-platform support high on the list of priorities is a major, critical trait of any collaboration technology.
The world is not made up only of people on Windows computers. Even the formal cost of excluding a few critical people that you can't invite because they do not use Windows can be indeed a very defeating experience (and the worst promotion a technology can make for itself).
Therefore, I think we must not take the lack of x-platform support lightly - especially when judging collaborative tools.
I would seriously like to see tools praised for their x-platform support - even when such tools come short in many other more popular features.
In the area of education, x-platform support is so important that functionality, features and even usability and cost, often are given much less weight when selecting a collaboration technology to adopt.
Common ground is fundamental here - and what I see is that most vendors in this industry are not very interested in securing this interoperable ground for their technologies.
I know that creating cross-platform tools can be more costly and complicated, but if you also look at the amount of free and open source components that are already available out there, you need to acknowledge that there is also a great deal of savings that could be made by leveraging components and solutions, like Flash, VNC or Jabber, that are cost-effective and cross-platform complaint out of the box.
Best regards,
Thorkild Jensen

E-mail: tj[at]manmademedia.dk
Skype: thorkildjensen

Email received Feb. 2nd 2005