What can i say? For once I am genuinely surprised and taken aback by a news story. DimDim has been one of my favourite websites for a few years…why? because it offers free web conferencing and does it really WELL, i suppose I should say ‘did it really well’! Therefore it was with shock I read the news story that Salesforce.com had come in a paid $31 for DimDim. Nice bit of cash. Sell outs!
I do all my AD and SharePoint user training via a great combination of DimDim, to share my desktop and VMs, and Skype, for voice presentation and conferencing! Now I can no longer offer the regular training sessions I ran unless I find an alternative to DimDim. You’re probably asking why am I being a cheapskate and why not just pay for a service like Webex.
The reason, cos I run the courses for FREE! I don’t charge any of my students a single penny, I believe knowledge is to be shared and that’s how it should be! I run my next session tomorrow night so I have just over 24 hours to find an alternative.
It seems Salesforce purchased DimDim with weird aspirations of being to the business world what Facebook is to the social world. Yeah, right! How on earth will a web conferncing acquisition to the portfolio make you anything like Facebook??? It doesn’t make sense, do you use Facebook for webconferencing with those in your friends list?!!!
Also they harp on about ‘Cloud 2’ a lot, what on earth are they on about? When did we have Cloud 1? I can’t recall it.
Rant over, peace out and RIP www.dimdim.com