Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Google Sites: Competition to Basecamp

I have been writing on how much the newly announced Google Sites looks like a potential competitor to 37 signal's Basecamp. This looks to be even more the case reading from the notes Andrew Miller took during a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston (emphasis mine):

Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.
Google Apps is currently priced per user, which works well for intranets. But it won't for an extranet collaboration tool: you don't want to have to pay something extract for each additional person who has access to the site. Basecamp charges by project, which makes sense. Let's see how Google reconciles Google Apps per-user pricing model with the per-site or per-project pricing model that makes more sense for extranets.