It's sad to see Kiko is going down. As Dalai Lama says, "If you lose, don't lose the lesson". The number of write ups about why this happened to Kiko is huge, but it was a pleasure to see that people from the core Kiko team took it upon themselves to analyze what happened and do a post mortem.
In Actual Lessons from Kiko, Richard White writes - amon other things - "You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere":
"... but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it."
I frankly believe that this is a warning to a lot of startups in the Web 2.0 space. On can easily confuse the feedback from technology watchers with actual user (read mass consumer) adoption. If the latter is not in place, the former is not going to do the business much good.
Posted by nasser at August 19, 2006 10:01 PM