[Scottish] Re: how would an IT turkey vote for Christmas?

[Will Partain]

Gavin Henry wrote, quoting me:

> > What if you're a company and you want to *buy* the above?  You don't
> > want a server, you don't want an IT guy, you just want a Web panel
> > where you can tick "give us an issue tracker", and that's that.
> > Employees plug in their laptop, aim a web browser and/or VPN-thingy,
> > and it just works.
> 
> That's a hard problem too solve. When hosting companies do this kind of thing, 
> i.e. they provide hosted services, they tend to pick certain things. For 
> example you don't see many mod_perl or postgresql hostings, just because they 
> aren't that popular.
> 
> This is where I think the problem is, demand. It's a lot to invest in setting 
> up and configuring all the services you mentioned, and a gamble if you don't 
> know/have idea if they will all be used.

Hi; I suspect you're right, but it still doesn't quite compute for me.
I mean, these things aren't _that_ hard to set up, and keeping diff
customers out of each other's bits is getting easier (with virtualized
servers and the like).  A bit of web hacking to make a "user
interface" and you're away, no?

The point is, if a hosting company gives me three of the seven things
I need, I still have to go hire one of those cranky IT types for the
other four (and then might as well let him/her do all seven).  Maybe
my idea that "these eleven things will satisfy 93% of all SMEs" is
nonsense :-)

My perception is that JotSpot (http://www.jot.com/) is trying to play
in _exactly_ this space.  It's a wiki with pre-packaged "applications"
hung onto it; that plus a nice e-mail setup (those are available)
might get you quite a long way.  We'll see.

All further thoughts welcome!

Will