R.I.P. Enterprise RSS
It's with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.
A smattering of employees in big companies are using the free consumer app Google Reader, a paltry substitute for a business class RSS reader, and the rest of the business world is apparently satisfied to get information whenever they happen to stumble over it. It's insane - a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.
We love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it's their loss. It's our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.
Update: Some readers have said that "RSS" is too technical and won't be adopted by people until we call it something else. As a person with no technical background, I don't buy that. Here's my comment in response to that discussion.
Update 2: Newsgator investor Brad Feld is one of the most respected VCs among data driven startups and says I'm totally wrong about the state of the company. I'm going to look into it more and will update this post if my thoughts on the topic change.
The Market Doesn't Look Good
Newsgator, one of those three companies, announced today that it has closed another round of funding, unbelievably it's the 6th time the company has required an infusion of cash. Years after Newsgator launched, it appears to us that the funding is a life-support line for a company that has largely left enterprise RSS behind and has been humbled into selling advertising widgets. After acquiring Mac and Windows RSS readers that are still the best products in their class, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, and after launching the best mobile RSS reader on the market - Newsgator almost never talks about its RSS products anymore.
KnowNow, the second of the three companies that used to be discussed in this market, remade itself as an enterprise RSS vendor, talked up a big customer list and then quietly ceased to exist last year. Even that company's website doesn't exist anymore.
Attensa, the third of the three, offers a sophisticated "attention data" based option, but has been dealing with strange investor and executive issues for some time. We hear about a handful of people in the business world using Attensa's powerful Outlook plug-in, but not very many. We hear about next to no one using the company's feed server product. These vendors frequently say their customer lists can't be disclosed, but we don't hear people talking about using Attensa, either.
What Are People Using?
Almost everyone we talked to said they are using Google Reader to read their feeds for work. Using Google Reader at work is not a serious use of RSS. The program doesn't support password protected feeds, something any company using RSS internally would require, and feeds with very few subscribers are checked for updates very infrequently. The mobile version of Google Reader is suitable for hobbyists, not enterprise users.
Update: Several readers have objected to this section and asked "what makes an RSS reader a business class product? To that I answered elsewhere and will repost here:
A solid enterprise RSS strategy is subscribing to key news sources in your field, your competitors' blogs and search results, keyword searches, thought leaders and in the enterprise, internal company announcements, requests for assistance, financial, inventory or other information.
Features that make a reader business class = support for authenticated (pw protected) feeds, a good mobile version, local/offline caching, displaying diffs when items in feed have been changed, administrative control over dynamic OPML files, etc. being able to manage the subscriptions given to new members of a team.
Other users are reading feeds inside their email programs. Maybe that works well. We suspect that many people who combine email and RSS don't know how to use either, but we are totally open to being convinced otherwise. It seems to us that in order to effectively manage feeds they should live outside of email, as the two mediums are very different.
What Does it Mean?
A market without enterprise use of business class RSS readers is like a flock of sitting ducks. Any company that steps up to make serious strategic use of such software should be at an immediate advantage in terms of early and efficient access to information.
These three vendors all served the US market primarily, the situation may be different in other parts of the world. If international competitors start to know more, faster, than your company and running circles around you - they may be using syndication technology that you're not. Feeling comfortable in a competitive economy without being skilled in the use of pull-type information gathering strikes us as really decadent.
Forrester researcher Oliver Young came to a similar conclusion when he admitted that his prediction that 2008 would be a huge year for enterprise RSS was completely wrong.
But frankly I'm concerned there is something more fundamental going wrong here. At the end of the day enterprise RSS is predicated on the notion that shoving all communications through email is too inefficient and must be augmented with other communications channels. Is it possible that people simply don't feel that pain strongly enough to invest the time and effort to learn to use RSS?
We are amazed that this software hasn't caught on, but we presume it's attributable to the radically new paradigm RSS represents, poor engineering on the part of the software makers, customer apathy and fear of acronyms (like R.S.S.).
We're shaking our heads, but maybe there's more and better enterprise RSS use going on than we see. What's it like where you work?
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Could it be that everyone using RSS is still in the SMB or independent category, and too cheap to get a beefier client?
Could it be that everyone using RSS is still in the SMB or independent category, and too cheap to get a beefier client?
It's kind of like fuel. We have become so accustom to consuming it in a particular fashion, any change is disregarded no matter the benefits.
If dashboards take off, then maybe RSS will gain traction as the wiring? This probably requires: secure feed displaying widgets, good filters. Maybe people would see the need for an enterprise level feed reading widget, then move on to a fully blown enterprise feed reader?
Sigh - I'm not convinced that's a mass adoption route either, though maybe with a little and thinking and tweaking it might hint at a way forward?
RSS to the enterprise is a bit like one of those nano-needles to a single-cell micro-organism. Puncture the corporate membrane and its life drains away.
Enterprises are scared to disrupt their own structure and command lines by introducing uncontrolled information flows both internally (which can route around management) and externally (which can route around the official PR outputs and sales inputs of the company)
Stop drinking the silicon valley kool-aid. We're all geeks, but most of the world isn't. Remind me of that "email is dead" crap. Whatever.
Well either the products all sucked (and I don't think that's the case), people are fine with the limitations of Google Reader (no authenticated feeds), there's no market... or once again the tech companies have clueless pushed the technology vs the benefits.
I think it's mostly the latter. Look at the headline you used.. RIP Enterprise RSS. Now read that from the point of view of a manager in an enterprise. WTF does "Enterprise RSS" mean? What are the business reasons to care? What does it do for them? People don't care adopt RSS, just as people don't adopt XHTML, Javascript etc. They adopt products that use technology to do something that they value. No one cares about the technologies used to display this page... they want to read the page. Marketing the benefits of feeds to businesses as Enterprise RSS is remarkably clueless.
If people in an enterprise setting want to read public feeds, Google reader is fine. If they want to read protected feeds, it's simply not that hard to build internal sites with portals that let employees use those feeds.
However, before any of that happens, senior people in the enterprise space need to be educated on why they should care. If you're talking about using RSS to disseminate information about projects around t he company, you don't sell it as "RSS IS COOL" you sell it as a better way to get information to people than email and lay out why that is. Rinse and repeat that for other internal uses of syndication.
The consumption of Enterprise RSS feeds and the creation of the content in the feeds are both at fault here. There isn't enough 'good' information coming out of 'enterprise' RSS feeds and many people don't understand RSS (still).
When it comes to RSS readers, we've got to look at the enterprise itself and ask the following questions:
Does IT want users installing yet another software product?
Probably not. Microsoft Outlook is fairly standard in most large organizations. When people have to subscribe to internal / Enterprise RSS, IT staff will normally chose an existing application (Outlook) to read RSS.
Do users see the value in the RSS feed?
Many people still don't understand RSS. I've yet to run across an organization that puts really valuable information on an RSS Feed. If there is no valuable information on the feed, why subsribe? Hence...the reason Enterprise RSS is dying/dead.
I'm onboard with Rick. Enterprise RSS doesn't mean much. When RSS companies start talking about secure communications channels that intelligently and automatically route relevant information to the people who need/want it, light bulbs start lighting up. Enterprise RSS has been focused on deployment and all of the obstacles that involves. What has been missing is a focus on adoption based on new ways to streamline communication and collaboration. This ain't over. Maybe it's just getting started.
I wonder whether you're conflating two issues here: enterprise use of RSS as a technology and enterprise workers use of third-party RSS readers.
To take the second point first, most enterprise workers aren't allowed to just go and install any old software on their PCs. This would account for the lack of presence of these readers. Also, reading RSS is likely viewed as not work related, and so its frowned upon within the enterprise (remember, those enterprise folks have "real" work to do, they don't get paid to read BoingBoing all day long).
I think the more pertinent point is, where is the use of RSS as a technology within the enterprise.
Obviously, outbound marketers are starting to use it to syndicate messaging via blogs and corp web sites. However, I suspect inbound use is beginning to pick up. My evidence for this is purely anecdotal, as I haven't worked in the enterprise for quite a while, however, for the past couple of years I've had tangential connections to Microsoft SharePoint projects. These are only just starting to roll out in the enterprise - It takes big companies forever to change how they do things (the proverbial business processes), but once an idea takes hold, change can happen quite quickly.
I think Microsoft SharePoint could be the killer app for RSS in the enterprise. SharePoint has RSS built in and uses it to syndicate changes that happen within the SharePoint ecosphere and notify enterprise workers that something significant has happened. Of course, SharePoint RSS could work with third-party RSS readers, but it's really designed to be used with Microsoft's Office Suite, where enterprise workers can interface with SharePoint, through RSS and other means, directly.
So, I wouldn't write off RSS in the enterprise just yet. But, you're more likely to see adoption if it's wrapped in guise of cool applications (like SharePoint) rather than cool technologies.
Re the "don't call it RSS" argument - if at this point in time you work in a field where information is important and you haven't taken the time to figure out what RSS is, you deserve to get your lunch eaten. maybe that's just my frustration speaking but good lord, if the only difference between e-mail adoption and RSS is that e-mail has the word mail in it and RSS is strange enough a term that to lead you to leave piles of money on the table, that just doesn't make sense to me.
Re not being allowed to install software locally in biz, that make sense, though most people I've talked to say that IT is the one department most likely to use RSS in biz, so it doesn't seem like unfamiliarity is an issue.
Maybe the free flow of information in an organization isn't something people working in the organization want? If the proper incentives aren't in place to encourage this kind of information sharing, many people will hoard the info to gain power.
On the web, people push their RSS feeds because it leads to more traffic for their site, and everyone wants that. There needs to be some kind of equivalent to that within an organization.
I think there is still great potential for RSS as a technology, but the problem is how it is being used currently. I am a 20 year technology veteran, but I am still suffering from information overload. I've spent the last 2 weeks unsubscribing from dozens of email newsletters and the RSS feed pruning is next. The power of RSS is greatly untapped and it does nothing yet to solve my overload and that of every other human. It adds to it. Until RSS is smarter and bi-directional, it will likely be relegated to those that don't mind the pain.
"Attensa ... has been dealing with strange investor and executive issues for some time."
Can you elaborate on this? Or where can I read more? I'm curious about what's up there, given it did have some big-name investors.
I use Mac OS X Mail to manage my RSS feeds and I just love it. I get to benefit from all the usual email features like filtering, forwarding, and whatnot. Try it if you have not, and you may well become a convert. This is, to my knowledge, the simplest and most efficient way to deal with RSS without having to learn a new way. It all makes perfect sense. I am sure that there are several ways to nicely manage RSS feeds, but if you already are a Mac OS X Mail user, give it a spin!
Seth, that's just based on some previous conversations I've had with the company a couple months ago when I last considered writing this story. I don't feel at liberty to go into more details now as it was awhile ago. I'm sure you could ask them and they'd tell you, though, if it's important to you.
One thing missing from this (great) post is the cost of these tools. Looking at Newsgator & Attensa, these are expensive enterprise tools and trying to sell them to IT managers that don't fully understand RSS is next to impossible. Imagine saying to a CIO, who barely understands what RSS is, that you need $175,000 for Enterprise RSS software... it isn't an easy sell.
As someone who is responsible for bringing these tools into a large enterprise, it's taken a year just to explain & sell blogs, wiki's, etc. We're starting with lots of Open Source tools, and then trying to sell a huge expensive tool from one of these vendors is not easy. We're in the process of rolling our own, not because we want to, because we just can't get the funding for one of these products.
Marshall... your reply is indicative of a technology attitude. Email says what it is. It's electronic mail. No one asked people adopt Enterprise POP3 or Enterprise IMAP or Enterprise SMTP... they got people to adopt email. It was easy since the paradigm was easy to understand, but still... they sold the capability, not the pipes underneath. I'm sick of people in the tech industry who focus on the tech jargon, then complain that others need to get it.
People will no more "adopt RSS" than they adopted any other protocol. Solve a problem with the technology and they'll use it. Give them a new capability that they didn't know they would love and they'll love you. Whine at them with TLAs and they'll ignore you.
Rick - I have zero experience as a software developer and do not come from a technical background. I'm a poli sci major and a journalist who said "wow, that looks really useful!" and so I tried my.yahoo, then learned about Newsgator online. It *was* really useful and so I took the time to learn more. I'm not the one whining here.
I see RSS being useful in the enterprise not as a supplement to email, but rather for making the data currently housed in disparate applications and databases accessible through a common, lightweight UI.
Implemented effectively, it could help eliminate multiple sign-ons and related friction when trying to view data. It could also facilitate easier data migration (think of wordpress' import abilities) and stave off vendor-lock in.
An earlier commenter mentioned sharepoint to which I would add MS reporting services which has some interesting RSS abilities.
Why is RSS better in an enterprise than having information you care about emailed to you?
Marshall - I'm surprised by your conclusions in this post. As a long time investor (since the seed round) in NewsGator, I draw almost the opposite conclusion - Enterprise RSS (in whatever form you want to call it - and we see it emerging as a component of social computing for the enterprise) is very much alive.
I wrote a response on my blog at http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/01/enterprise-rss-at-newsgator-is-alive-and-well.html
I'd love to have you out to NewsGator in Denver anytime to show you the substantive products and company we've created.
Marshall: Its a nice writeup on the market, but I think you may be a bit too hasty in calling its death. Jon's comment about the pricing is dead on -- as they stand the tools are just too expensive. However I think its a safe assumption that the price will come down. And as more businesses invest in blogs, wikis, and other content creation tools it will only drive up the need for RSS and other content access tools. I'm not yet willing to pull the trigger on another prediction that RSS will have a "banner year" (the last one still smarts), but I don't expect to see Enterprise RSS disappear any time soon.
I think you're right that RSS is under-utilized within businesses, and so many people who could benefit from getting news pushed to them this way don't.
However looking only at commercial readers might not tell the whole story. In my company a lot of people use SharpReader, which is a powerful desktop feedreader, and which is free...
What Tony said about Dashboards creating the users pull (which has broader use, iGoogle, MyYahoo and Netvibes; or Google Reader and clients?). We failed to standardize the Coffee Cup, that is, to make it more usable. And perhaps standards to make it more manageable and secure. And that said, I disagree with your premise and agree with Brad's points. Oliver likes the idea of prices falling with competition, the the other thing that happens is innovation.
Newsgator has more than a significant marketing opportunity. And RSS is part of what makes this whole damn space work. Maybe we should all get together again and find new standards, building upon simple things that work, that solve real problems like RSS does rather simply -- instead of singling out cows for general methane (I'm still working on this metaphor).
Give it more time Marshall. Dramatic 'pronouncements of death' are often premature :)
In this part of the world (SE Asia) we're seeing more & more top management wanting tools for themselves and their teams to connect to "Facebook and these social network things". Feeds and aggregation/search tools are the perfect wiring for this. But the front end? There's a lot of choice and individual needs vary. A decently setup igoogle/netvibes page can work wonders..so why pay?
I'm going to repeat a lot of other people and jump on the RSS has barely taken off outside of the early adopters and RSS hasn't really been sold as a way to get information.
wow - all the rss fanboys are going crazy, like MK just kicked their dogs in the head. wtf? get a grip, people. it's a blog post. get a life. go outside and get some fresh air. and then come back inside and write a thoughtful response -- i.e. act like a human being.
among the many tirades up above, there was a hint of a substance - that rss is not a replacement for email as a concept easily understood by folks. i think it could depend on more on the sources of info being made available that folks would actually want to subscribe to - stuff that would be terrible for email - like updates from corporate wiki pages, etc.
I agree with Rick's comments. There is a big difference between what technology people think is better and what end-users/customers think. in a market, end-users rule, and they give their answer through either purchasing the product or not. if purchases are not there, the argument about unrealized value is rhetorical: there is no value for this market niche. either reposition the product or jump out of the ship. if the industry answer is the latter, oh well, that's Schumpeterian destructive creation at its best...
I agree with Chris - most people don't get RSS and are stuck in a rut of navigation which is difficult to change. RSS is a powerful tool, but like many things that work, it doesn't matter if you can't change human behavior. I also agree for the same reasons that e-mail isn't going anywhere soon. . . .
From a blog post I wrote last month in response to Oliver Young about him reflecting on his predictions for Enterprise RSS:
For me the absence of Enterprise RSS (and perhaps along with other key infrastructure, like Enterprise Search and social tagging tools) in environments where we find wikis, blogs and social networking tools is a sign of tactical or immature implementations of enterprise social computing. We are just at the beginning of this journey.
Of course this isn't a sure sign that existing Enterprise RSS solutions will continue in their current forms. But what I am sure about is that if we really want to bring Web 2.0 inside the firewall, then we need Enterprise RSS functionality in that mix. And that's because the 9X email problem isn't just a barrier for Enterprise RSS adoption, but a barrier for Enterprise 2.0 itself.
In this respect, I can actually see many opportunities for integrating Enterprise RSS features into Enterprise Search solutions or into existing portal platforms (actually, Confluence is a great example of a feed friendly wiki platform - both to create and consume). And why doesn't Microsoft Exchange play a greater role in supporting sophisticated Enterprise RSS capabilities? I suppose in a way this is exactly what Newsgator are doing for the Microsoft suite.
http://chieftech.blogspot.com/2008/12/where-next-for-enterprise-rss-in-2009.html
For those of you trying to raise awareness of what Enterprise RSS can do, also have a look at http://enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com/
It is surprising that Enterprise RSS has not taken off as much as it should have. I feel one thing missing was an easy tool that enables end users (not just IT) to create and share RSS feeds from data stored in Databases and applications. Some examples that come to mind are System notifications such as Workflow Signoff notification or a "Change of Status" notifications.
We, at JackBe (http://www.jackbe.com/dev), have implemented capabilities to create RSS feeds from just about any Service (REST/WSDL/Database etc) and quickly share the results as a feed -> http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/create-rss-feed-any-service-output
You seem to have missed the point of my above comments so I'll try again. It's not that the term is too technical or that people can't understand what RSS does... it's that people do not adopt protocols, they adopt solutions to problems. Positioning this as Enterprise RSS doesn't say what it does for any enterprise. My comment about being technical was about the mindset within Silicon Valley especially and the larger industry. The tech industry repeatedly tries to sell technologies... people mostly don't buy technologies. They things that address a pain they have or provide a new ability that they can use.
I'd take your post more seriously if you'd taken the time to talk to the companies involved and done some actual research, but as it is, this seems like off the cuff editorializing and little more. Calling Newsgator's recent funding a 'life-support line' and saying the market doesn't look good without providing some actual information isn't up to your standards.
Rick - I appreciate that you believe the rest of my work constitutes high standards :) but I respectfully disagree with what you're saying. Surely SaS, Cloud Computing and goodness knows what else is getting sold in large part as technology. As for pain points, RSS increases efficiency of communication and cuts delays in the delivery of actionable information. I think that's pretty clear.
As for talking to the companies, I've spoken to all three of these companies repeatedly, for years. That's in large part what my thoughts here are based on.
I strongly second Rick's and Scott's view that people are talking too much about technology and products and not enough about real-world use cases. Simply stating how great RSS is and that it could be very useful won't get you much buy-in, not from management nor most importantly end-users. We need to make the technology relevant to the people, not the other way around. Understand users and use cases, then decide on technology!
In two of our projects with large law firms we included an RSS feedreader in the social software mix (among wiki, blogs, social bookmarking).
We introduced it primarily to Knowledge Management Lawyers (KML) that needed to gather a lot of content from various sources. They also use it to subscribe to updates from the wiki and blogs. They appreciate the fact that it is much easier to plow through a stream of updates rather than going from email to email and deleting every one of them. Some of the lawyers picked up that concept, too and started using an feedreader. Others wanted to consume their feeds on their BB or in their Inbox, which was catered for as well.
Have a look at two case studies: Dewey & LeBoeuf and Allen & Overy
In another project with a large law firm we took a very close look at the production (and consumption) of current awareness material. Current awareness included for example information on current developments within legal practices, latest court decisions etc. The firm made extensive use of newsletters to disseminate that kind of information. There was a multitude of newsletters available, some of them covering similar grounds. Maintaining email lists was very time-consuming and frustrating. Consumers did not know which newsletter were available. Also, newsletters were not personalised nor very timely, as they had a specific publishing date. We therefore recommended using RSS as delivery format, which would make the process of producing and consuming content more efficient and in the end more cost-effective as shown in a business case. This has been piloted but not been fully rolled out yet.
At E20 in Boston last year Attensa showcased another very interesting use case of RSS .
It's true RSS has not taken off yet, partially because people don't understand the different concept, but also because we have not fully explored its full potential yet.
Nevertheless, RSS does play a vital role in the 'Social Stack'enabling a free flow of information. Once CRM, DMS, Intranet and other proprietary system vendors thoroughly implement RSS functionality, it will get a big push. And with more and more information floating around via RSS we will need the likes of Newsgator, Attensa or GoogleReader.
I'm not convinced enterprise software is better than individual use of web-based readers. There's a lot to be said for the stronger sense of personal ownership you get from building your own library -and adoption is more likely to succeed using something web-based that you can access anywhere.
But an enterprise approach to educating employees about the benefits and basic use of RSS, with a few suggested feeds for starters, is absolutely the way to go.
I have never worked anywhere where RSS is used by more than a handful of tech enthusiasts. It's such a pity.
Christoph, thanks for that comment. All this "focus on the benefits and not the technology" talk sounds nice, but really - what got *you* started using RSS? Probably curiosity, and once you tried it, you saw how awesome it was and it was a no brainer to keep using it - right? Either way, any experience that persuaded readers here to try RSS is, I'm sure, something that enterprise RSS software vendors also invoke in their sales pitches.
In this post I'm all like "OMG RSS, it's obviously wonderful, what's your problem!?" but I'm sure that's NOT how these companies sell it! And yet it's not catching on! I think the inertia of people in the business world is in large part to blame!
It reminds me of a story that Toronto-based mainstream newspaper reporter Mathew Ingram told on Twitter a few months ago. He went to a classroom of journalism students and asked "who here is interested in blogging?" He said *almost none of them were* -- they all were looking for newspaper jobs! Should he have stopped using the word "blog" and instead told them about all the wonderful benefits of blogging? No! They should have paid attention, gotten off their asses and taken the landscape of their profession seriously enough that they'd spend the *one afternoon* that it takes to grasp the awesomeness of blogging OR RSS.
I think a tipping point might come if ERP apps providers (SAP, Oracle, etc.) started publishing RSS feeds of ERP data!
That data is the lifeblood of the co. If CxO's and snr mgmnt could subscribe to feeds which said alert me whenever a sales lead comes in >$x, for eg or tell me whenever an order comes in for greater than y units, or tell me whenever line fallout on a batch goes above 5%, or...
Well, you get the idea.
When this data is available to be consumed by RSS, then the demand for RSS Readers in the Enterprise will bloom.
If you can’t successfully explain a new technology in a couple of sentences to a normal human being then I think you have a real problem getting it into the mainstream and I think this was RSS’s Achilles heel. There was no real world *manual* process that you could point at and say “hey it’s like this but better”, a good example being email versus postal mail.
Whenever a company offers there previously paid for service for free I immediately think there not making enough money on it and that’s what I thought when Newsgator made theirs free. It was then I was sure there was no big money to be made from RSS.
We actually wrote an RSS Reader (www.feedghost.com) in the hope that we could ride the RSS wave of enthusiasm to sunny Eldorado but alas it lost its momentum– we liked to think it was a pretty good reader but we never really got the customer numbers we needed to make it a full time development proposition. We still work on it as a labour of love when we can and use it as a technology showcase for our dev skills but that’s about it.
I still use it and think it’s great but I think RSS will always be a niche technology - at least until someone can explain / implement it better.
Cheers
Lee
In our company, we had a survey in April (2008), asking managers if they needed a RSS Reader.
Some figures:
72 managers responded,
68 managers subscribed to more than one (company) blog.
9 managers already used iGoogle or a RSS Reader,
13 managers replied they did not need a RSS Reader,
50 managers replied they need a RSS Reader.
As a result we planned a project to select and deliver a company RSS Reader. The project will be executed mid 2009.
Perhaps your analysis, 'RIP Enterprise RSS', came to soon?
Completely agree with @Tom Raftery on post 37:
"When this data is available to be consumed by RSS, then the demand for RSS Readers in the Enterprise will bloom."
Give them what they want and they will pay for !
I am not a geek. My line is management education; I co-design practical action learning programmes for senior execs.
When I 'got' RSS a couple of years ago, I wrote a short exec briefing, 'The ABC of RSS'. The view I took was 'why should you, a time-pressured and busy manager care?' and listed as many uses as I could think of.
And you are right. Once people see what RSS can do for them, they understand how awesome it is. Maybe RSS in the enterprise is quietly alive, its use growing slowly and yeast-like?
RSS is great, but it is an expensive drug (information) addiction. It takes a lot of investment to keep up with feeds.
As such it will remain a niche used by people with a need to increase information flow an order of magnitude and the time to commit to that flow.
In some ways it's a bit like the media niche of Twitter; the media business is predicated on information flow and so the media industry is disproportionately interested in it.
Emailing interesting stories, digg etc, provide an adequate solution for a mainstream audience.
I agree Jasper, but I believe it can become far more popular, if it is meant to replace email and provide channels of communication and collaboration. None of these companies have gotten this yet. Information overload will prevent most people from trying RSS or continuing to use it, because they fear anything that adds more info to their lives no matter how much better you tell them it will be with RSS.
Maybe I'm one of the only people that agrees with your post. We did an in depth investigation on Enterprise RSS in our company. We built our own feedreader some time ago, but this app was outdated, compared to Google Reader and the like. And because we thought feedreaders/feedreading matured we were quite convinced we'd find a vendor that would meet our needs. Sorry to say we didn't find one. One of the main reasons is security. We wrote about it here. Newsgator seems to be the only one responding to our wishlist and actually says they will address our needs soon.
So, for now I'm using RSSpopper to read internal feeds.
This implies there is a big opportunity in this market. If you get things right here (and why not just start by copying Google Reader and adding security features?), you're in big business.
So, Enterprise RSS is not dead, but it hasn't really come alive yet.
Brad, I agree with your implicit assumption that email needs to be replaced and more collaborative channels developed.
The advantage with email, Digg etc is that humans act as filters and that is ferociously effective. Traditional surfing meets wisdom of crowd, blah, blah, blah. RSS is a brute force attack on the problem.
I'm a strong believer that to replace incumbent tech, the usurper needs to be an order of magnitude better. 5 times better doesn't cut it.
I don't doubt that RSS DNA will be part of the DNA of the surf+email model replacement, but there needs to be more to achieve the OoM improvement. Interestingly, I think Google Reader could get there. Its combination of RSS with sharing, if it integrated with a few more things (shared bookmarks, seamless communications), could be extremely disruptive.
Enterprise RSS sounds a lot like Pointcast/Marimba/[generic "push" technologies from 1998] when you sell it as just a technology. As others have said already, you might as well have said "receiving asynchronous updates about activity in the enterprise is dead" and then your message would have been clearer and easier to discard as misguided/addressing a problem that doesn't exist.
"Surely SaS, Cloud Computing and goodness knows what else is getting sold in large part as technology"
I can't speak about the enterprise RSS market with any authority, but as a provider of SAAS technology I can tell you that the vast majority of our customers have never heard of the acronym SAAS or "software as a service." They just want to be able to do surveys.
Good article, and it gets me thinking of the failure of RSS, which is mysterious to me. I don't think we can truly ring the death knell, since RSS is much like an API or some other technical architecture that allows us to automate something that normally takes human effort. I do want to fully place the blame on why RSS isn't more popular on Microsoft. I think they mishandled integration of RSS feeds in Outlook. I was shocked to be bombed by RSS feeds (all from MS central) when I installed Office, it actually was quite cumbersome to turn the things off, and since RSS IS NOT EMAIL, it just introduced people to a larger email inbox, which nobody wants. Only a few readers use a different metaphor than email with folders and inboxes. I think of RSS as a personalized newspaper, I can read, skip, or just leave it alone and let it get bigger and bigger. This is unlike web (goal driven) or email (time driven) and it just didn't hit a sweet spot for most users. For enterprise use, I have tried to cheerlead on how great RSS is, but outside of the reader that recommended integration with Sharepoint, I still think think its an interface issue.
I think most people just don't get it (partly down to "RSS" and also the what it is isn't communicated that well on sites).
This article saddens me, as I love RSS, but not suprised it hasn't taken off in the enterprise world. Information overload already exists plus there is always a reluctance to learn anything new, partciularly something of a technical nature, in enterprises.
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