The Clued and the Clueless

Mark Justman, from the Institute for Alternative Futures (leading one to ask: aren’t all futures alternatives?) recommends Zoot as a product and a company:

Zoot is a ECCO/Agenda-like PIM that is coded and
sold by a one-man operation. What can be rather
interesting is that bug fixes and suggested new
features can (and do) get added in a matter of
days…not months or never.

Also, the Zoot faithful do a fair share of user
support on the Zoot discussion group, which also
contains sample databases and instructional files
created by Zoot users. Several of these users have
even begun to construct a collaborative guide and
help manual for Zoot:

It’s also a very nifty tool for personal Knowledge
Management.

I haven’t installed the demo version yet, but James Fallows, in a 1997 review in The Atlantic Monthly, praises it. The site has a sense of humor, and the fact that it was built by one person (a recovering ad man) makes me trust its voice more. (Could I have fallen for a fiendish attempt to sound friendly? Absolutely!)

Jonathan Peterson writes:

… I think it’s a
really nicely put together view of how NOT to grow a
Cluetrained company. I’ve long been hoping that
someone would write down what happened at arsDigita
and Philip Greenspun can’t because of his legal
settlement.

The drift from open, active profitable (What Joel
calls the Ben and Jerry’s model) to big, closed (and finally unprofitable is
sad and painful even to the detached reader. The
quotes from employees are the voices that pull the
whole story together.

Categories: Uncategorized dw