Oh, man, what a bummer. They had this really cool platform (albeit one that needed a lot of work) for building lightweight collaborative apps that was totally unlike anything else out there... now they've just got another wiki/widget platform.
I see Joe and Graham have moved to greener pastures within the company (Joe is head of Product Management and they both worked on OpenSocial), but I wish they hadn't abandoned their vision of a wiki app plaform.
The net effect is to make businesses, small businesses in particular, more leery of doing business with startups. These guys succeeded and abandoned the promises they had made to their customers. Google did support it as is, but most early buyers don't want "as is" for the next 18 months.
We currently use Jotspot for a wiki and bug tracking. It was the best solution out of products we tested and it was free. Now they have removed so many features (from looking at the screen shots). I hope the Bug Reporter is in the new version!
This is another key component in Google's strategy to create a suite of products capable of real traction in the corporate marketplace - and that will make them money and (incidentally) cut way into Microsoft profits.
Now as a start-up - are you wasting money running a host of "internal" support software or are you using what is out there and freely available? The latter of course, because what matters is what you are building. Well that's how it is gong to be soon for a lot of businesses who have "made it" - they are not going to waste money and (perhaps more important) management time running their internal support IT functions. Yes they will run ERP systems but why get tangled up with office software/email/Intranet etc. etc.
I see Joe and Graham have moved to greener pastures within the company (Joe is head of Product Management and they both worked on OpenSocial), but I wish they hadn't abandoned their vision of a wiki app plaform.