The culmination of cloud, social and contextual collaboration is creating a perfect storm.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  And so email has been used for decades as the de facto collaboration tool.  Since IBM Profs in ’80’s and Lotus Notes in ’90’s, companies have tried to offer better alternatives.  However, these alternatives fell short due to complexity, inflexibility and cost.  Web solutions cropped up, but they just duplicated an antiquated paradigm.

For the first time, the decreasing costs and increasing capabilities and acceptance of the cloud, coupled with the familiarity of social technology and ubiquity of thin client, contextual collaboration is poised to deliver transformative value to business, no less than the size of the email industry.

Social promises to make information more accessible by turning information sharing upside down.  Rather than forcing people to fit into information structures like folders and subfolders, social is making the info structures fit the social structures.