I recently had a briefing by CCtext.net — a very new entry into the wiki marketplace from China. I was a little bit conflicted about this product at first. There are over 100 wiki servers in the marketplace, and I wondered why would the market need another option? Or more specifically, what would a new wiki platform bring to the table that does not already exist?
When I started to use CCtext it seemed to me that its best feature that it has is the simplicity and speed in which you can use the wiki. It’s fast and easy. So the opportunity you have when selecting this options becomes one of balance — is fast and easy enough to overcome some of the missing features that other wikis have?
To be fair, CCtext is still in beta, and all products start off with few features and then develop in their direction. So from the perspective of a beta product, it’s impressive – it has a lot to offer and it is easy to use. But the timing may be the real problem here. 6 years ago the marketplace would have grabbed this wiki. But now, it’s a very tough market. Expectations are high and competition is good.
One think that CCtext has in its favor is that it is an XMind product. XMind has proven to be a successful and well respected mindmapping platform. I would not be surprised if there is some plan to merge the two products together somehow, but I’m not sure about any details of how that might work. Personally I think a vendor who is looking to integrate wiki capability into their product might want to take a serious look at CCText and discuss some technology integration.
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I first took a look at CCText a couple months ago, and was not impressed either as a wiki geek or a business user.
When I tested it out I didn’t find it to be faster at all than good WYSIWYG wikis (i.e. not the systems slapped on top of legacy MediaWiki), though admittedly this may have improved in couple of months that have passed since then.
More importantly, markup is an impediment to use by non-geeks. I asked the people behind CCText directly about it, and apparently they really think markup is in the best interest of the average joe.
On the up side for CCText, I thought it was had great design and overall user experience, which is more than some of the enterprise wikis out there can easily claim. I think things like the markup are huge barriers to overcome, but there’s still plenty of room in the wiki market for a smart newcomer.
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Thanks for the comment Steven. I guess I try to look for the positive, so that’s why I commented that UI comes across pretty cleanly and I found the interaction to be fast. Yet, at the end of the day, this product did not seem destined for mass-success in its current go-to-market strategy. Hence my best suggestion would be to sell the technology, not to try to go retail – or package the technology with some other process (that has more market appeal). I did not comment in the blog post that the pricing strategy did not excite me either. And yes, the markup thing is a problem, one they try to cover with with the nifty preview. Had this been around 6 years ago, I think people would have loved it (since it is so much better than most of the available options that were around at that time). It seemed like they needed to really think through what options are out there and how they can stand out above the rest.