"How can a company start developing a tool for collaboration with the full intent to exclude certain users due to their choice of platform? Tools for collaboration ought to secure a common ground for collaboration, not be an obstacle that excludes people.

In fact, it appears to me, that developers of these tools act as if the tools were technologies designed for individual private tasks on whatever computer platform they happened to operate. This approach makes sense in the area of Personal Computing, but it does not make sense in the area of Collaborative Computing."

This is what Thorkild Jensen wrote me yesterday via email, about his disappointment for the lack of x-platform support by online collaboration and conferencing vendors.

Thorkild is an avid researcher of cost-effective online collaboration solutions and felt compelled enough by the scarcity of cross-platform solutions to ask from my team at Kolabora.com a bit of more rigour in attending at our role of industry guides in this respect.

"In the area of education, x-platform support is so important that functionality, features and even usability and cost, often are given much less weight when selecting a collaboration technology to adopt.
Common ground is fundamental here - and what I see is that most vendors in this industry are not very interested in securing this interoperable ground for their technologies."

Thorkild has really a good argument on this and his complaint is the type of content that best fits the role that Kolabora.com has set to exercise: being a bridge between end users and the industry; facilitating and allowing the creation of tools and technologies that are interoperable, user-friendly and cost-effective.

If you want to read his message in full, here is the full email he sent me.