Dimdim

» see dimdim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The interesting thing about Dimdim was the license. Web conferencing in 2007 meant WebEx or GoToMeeting, which meant a corporate purchase order and an installer that a locked-down office machine would refuse to run. Dimdim's answer was a meeting that opened in the browser you already had, plus a community edition of the server that anybody could download and put on their own hardware. Two things at once: a hosted service you could use for free, and the actual software, given away.

It came out of Boston with an engineering team in Pune, founded in 2006 by DD Ganguly and Prakash Khot, and funded by Index Ventures with Nexus India Capital behind it. The hosted tiers were free for ten participants, twenty five dollars a month for fifty with the collaboration tools, and seventy five for webinars running to a thousand attendees. Presenters could share a desktop or push slides while talking over a webcam. Reviewers compared it to WebEx, usually favorably on price and unfavorably on how finished it felt, and the last major release before the sale, version 5.5, was widely called out for shipping in something close to alpha condition.

None of this reached me at the time, and I want to be accurate about why rather than vague. Meetings on a screen were not a thing people in Turkish engineering offices did in 2010. You called somebody or you walked to their desk, and remote work in the sense the word acquired later did not exist as a normal arrangement. The whole category stayed invisible here until March 2020, when it became the only way anything happened, and by then Dimdim had been gone for nine years.

~ the case file ~

~ the open source part ~

The community edition is what gave Dimdim a constituency larger than its paying customers. It plugged into Moodle, which meant universities used it to run classes, and it hooked into Zimbra and SugarCRM for people building their own stacks. Unlike the hosted tiers, the self-installed server had no participant limit, so a school with a spare machine could run meetings for as many people as the hardware allowed and pay nothing.

That constituency wrote the documentation and built the integrations, then recommended the product to their employers. It also had no contract with anybody. When the company was sold, the people who had done the most to make it worth buying were the ones with the least standing to object.

~ the ten weeks ~

Salesforce announced the acquisition on 6 January 2011, at thirty one million dollars, and framed it around Chatter, its internal social product, which needed real-time meetings and did not have them. Almost immediately Dimdim users received notice that service would continue until 15 March 2011 and that after that date neither side would have any further rights or obligations, including any right to access the site. Separately, the open source project was declared unsupported.

The response was loud in the places that had carried the product. Network World ran a piece under the headline "Salesforce.Com and DimDim: Shame on You". Moodle's community press covered it as a straightforward abandonment. Competitors started running invitations aimed directly at stranded Dimdim users within days. Salesforce did not adjust the timeline, and there is no evidence it ever considered doing so: an acquihire with a codebase attached does not need the old customers, and closing them out quickly is cheaper than winding down slowly.

~ the funny part ~

Dimdim's founding premise, that a video meeting should open by clicking a link with nothing installed, is now so completely the default that it is hard to remember it was ever an argument. Zoom made that its whole pitch and became a verb. Google Meet does it in a tab. The thing Dimdim was early about was correct.

The rest of the story is less flattering to the buyer. Salesforce Chatter never became the meeting product the acquisition was supposed to enable, and Salesforce ended up partnering with, and later buying, other people's conferencing. Thirty one million dollars bought a team and shut down a service that was doing the right thing five years too soon, and the thing it was doing right got done by somebody else in 2013 for a great deal more money.

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