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As this post from the company’s blog puts it, Ubuntu One is “the hot newcomer” in the world of file-sharing services. And Podio’s integration makes it an even more viable option for business users – you can add Ubuntu One files to Podio App items or Tasks, and share them in messages and status updates.

But wait – let’s not put the cart before the horse. Copenhagen-based Podio is only doing this because of Ubuntu One’s popularity. And the surprising thing is how popular demand was.

Remember here that Linux’s share of the general desktop market is around 1.4 percent, or at least it was back in January.

“So 10 percent of our users are using Ubuntu to access Podio – which is surprisingly high we think,” a Podio spokesperson tells me. “Also, supporting Ubuntu has been on the product roadmap for a couple years over here, so we hear the request often, more so after the launch of Ubuntu One.”

To help put this into further perspective, or possibly to confuse matters: Ubuntu One can be used on Windows, iOS, Android and even Mac these days (and Linux, obviously); and only 40 percent of Ubuntu users use Ubuntu One (at least, that’s what one survey said in April).

10 percent. That is indeed surprising, especially given that Ubuntu had supposedly lost its sheen for Linux aficionados. But 10 percent of what?

Podio’s spokesperson told me that the company has been referring to a 40,000-organization-strong user base for “far too long”, and is indeed gearing up to reveal updated figures that are “certainly much higher”.

So that’s a reasonably sizeable set we’re looking at. Until Podio revises its user numbers, it’s impossible to clearly say how many of those organizations are toting Ubuntu, but it’s a heck of a lot more than I expected.

What should we read into this? Not too much. This is one figure from one service provider, and there’s probably an explanation that’s not been not considered. I have no idea what that might be (suggestions are welcome), but it is so very unlikely that Linux – nay, a single Linux distro – is responsible for 10 percent of a fairly major collaboration platform’s user base.

As for Ubuntu One, maybe the service is a dark horse. Over time, it’s acquired many features that you’d associate with iCloud or Google’s synchronization services. It’s really not there yet – contact synchronization is a bust – but it could be, given a bit more time. Who knows: if we hear more figures like this, it could be a contender.

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But something was clearly in the works – Earlybird’s recent purchase of HTGF’s stake was largely intended to ensure future investment, and it came with talk of 6Wunderkinder taking a heads-down approach. So I spoke to CEO Christian Reber to find out what’s happening with the company’s two products – as it turned out, he had some interesting opinions to share about Windows 8, too.

Meyer: You’re pretty much in between major releases of Wunderlist, right?
Reber: Yeah, you’re totally right. We launched Wunderlist 18 months ago and it’s going great – 2.5 million users, more than 5.5 million downloads, 100 million tasks created. And we launched Wunderkit in February as a beta product. We’re analysing it, testing new features, improving improving improving – but right now we’re working on the evolution of Wunderlist.

Is Wunderkit actually an active avenue for you, or is it more experimental?
It’s totally experimental, totally numbers-driven – if we see something works, we work on it. For Wunderlist we haven’t pushed out updates for eight months on some platforms. With the new release, Wunderlist will be able to talk with Wunderkit.

During creating Wunderkit, we realised a startup should be careful of doing two products at the same time, which is why we merged them somehow, at least technically.

You’ve not given numbers for Wunderkit’s adoption yet. Is the platform still growing?
It is growing – it has hundreds of thousands of users. It’s not a product that doesn’t work. We built the product in order to see if this is the future of our company, and does it meet our vision. We launched it and knew really quickly we had to improve something because it was not growing as fast as Wunderlist.

We made decisions in terms of how we continue with it, but overall in terms of strategy we can’t talk about it too much, because the productivity market is crazily active right now. You see a lot of products that adopt features or design ideas from Wunderkit, so it can’t be wrong [laughs].

Is Wunderlist just an easier proposition for people? How would you characterise the difference between the two?
Right now Wunderlist is the easier product. Wunderkit is maybe a niche product – it’s smaller than Wunderlist. The model I have in my head is that Wunderlist is task management for consumers, and Wunderkit is more project management for consumers. The question is, what do you have more of? More tasks or more projects?

More tasks, I’d imagine.
[Nods] We have a vision and I definitely want to build up a company that’s able to build more than one product. If we see something isn’t working… I mean, Apple did the same [with] MobileMe and iCloud. If you want to be successful, disrupt yourself.

What are your thoughts on the productivity app scene in general?
It’s a very interesting market. At first nobody believed in it – for us fundraising was super-hard because social was the big thing. Now it’s crazy, with Evernote and Dropbox. The space is getting more and more interesting – that’s why I stopped talking too much about strategy. It was interesting that Podio did an exit [sold to Citrix for $53m]. That was an interesting milestone for them.

I know you’d prefer not to talk strategy, but what will Wunderlist’s evolution bring?
Without going too deep into features, we want to continue going in the direction we came from. It was never a geeky product, it was never made for teams to organise or anything. It was made for consumers, for mothers. We built a product for the eight-year-old kid in school organising his homework, but also the fifty-year-old organising his company. Many task managers focus on one direction, such as team organisation. That’s where we let the product evolve. There will be new features that have never been implemented in a task manager before, and even to move away from the task manager thing… I can’t talk too much about the features now…

With a task manager, how most people use it is they put stuff in, and if they don’t have anything to do, they open it and look. For us the biggest focus is making it a product people can’t live without. If someone else completes a task, you want to know.

So it’s going to become social?
Maybe a little [laughs]. I wouldn’t say we’re going into a typical social product, but if there’s a feature that’s smartly integrated and is kind of social, you could say that.

We’re currently building a Wunderlist app for Windows 8 Metro. We won’t relaunch Wunderlist on every platform at the same time, because it’s too crazy, too much work. We will focus on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the web. Windows Phone will follow, but not as part of the initial launch.

Have you been working with Microsoft on that?
Everyone knows Microsoft wants every developer to build product for their platform. My personal opinion about Metro – OK, we came from Windows development and went to Mac. If Microsoft does it right, they can definitely have a huge impact on the cross-platform market. The question is, are they doing it right? It’s HTML5 so it’s a good technology, it’s a good interface, but I have my concerns.

What concerns in particular?
It’s more about how Microsoft approaches this concept. You have to build two different apps, for the normal Windows platform and for Metro. We had huge problems creating our app for Windows 8 – we had to stop because we had problems doing it. The tech wasn’t ready.

At what point was that?
Four to five months ago. The problems are fixed now, but if you take a look at the [Metro] interface, not everyone will like it. If it was my project I’d stop it, tell the designers to think one more time about the interface, and find a solution that everyone loves. But we support it at least. Microsoft is smart – they have the right people to market it and launch it.

6wunderkinder has been around for a couple of years now. Are you finding the Berlin scene’s getting even more active these days?
I’m definitely seeing more companies evolving. A year ago I’d have said it’s amazing, et cetera, but right now the scene is realising it should maybe do less hype and focus on building serious businesses that make money and really are relevant globally. Hype is great but it’s not sustainable. The scene is doing a strategy shift in terms of professionalising. Many founders are hidden now, focusing on their businesses 24/7.

And in the long term, are you looking for an exit or IPO?
Every startup entrepreneur who doesn’t think a single time about an exit is probably naïve. But I’m definitely not thinking about an exit right now. IPO is the goal, definitely.

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Jacob Morgan, co-founder of collaboration consultancy Chess Media Group, recently posted his answer to this question on his blog. His perspective: we’re still waiting for a breakout collaboration product, and it should look like “WordPress for the enterprise.” Of course, there is an enterprise version of WordPress, but assumedly that’s not what Morgan means. He explains how the collaboration solution he’d most like to see is instead like WordPress in key ways:

What we need is a “WordPress for the enterprise” and before its acquisition I thought Podio was the closest to moving down that road.  When you think of WordPress you think of a content management and delivery platform but it’s more than that.  Take a look at how many millions of sites all run on WordPress, each with a unique look and feel and each with it’s own set of features and plugins that can be customized and added to make every site unique and individual.  Currently we don’t have anything like this for the enterprise.  Sure, some vendors have their own app stores where you can buy and download application specific additions but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Atlassian is probably the closest vendor out there to building a complete enterprise ecosystem with apps but even those are focused on the single platform.

He calls this vision of DIY collaboration suites supported by an extremely flexible platform “the widgetized enterprise” and says there are several roadblocks keeping us from this version of the future. One, “we don’t have collaboration standards for all the vendors out there to get them to speak the same language,” and two the market lacks a true platform vendor. But Morgan has hopes that we’ll see something like what he’s after soon. “Eventually we will get to a more widgetized collaboration platform that allows us to take the bits and pieces we want from every vendor and combine them together to make something that works for us,” he concludes.

What do you make of Morgan’s vision of the future of collaboration tools – have you already found a platform that’s flexible and customizable enough to meet your business’s needs, or are does WordPress for the enterprise sound like the solution you’ve been searching for?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Phil Manker.

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Lilly Hanscom, communications manager at collaboration platform Podio, for instance, got in touch with an audio recording of a thought-provoking SXSW panel discussion called ‘Decentralized Organizations: Do They Work?‘ She thought it was a cool unpacking of the underlying philosophy that animates her company, but it also fits right in with the preoccupations of WebWorkerDaily.

In it, Thomas Malone, director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the seminal 2004 book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life, lays out how cheap, ubiquitous communication (i.e., the Internet) is empowering more workers to make decisions for themselves. Like a faint echo of the argument that new communication tools have been bad news for dictators around the world the last few years, Malone explains that getting more information to more people at work is also bad for office autocrats and good for knowledge-worker freedom and productivity (it’s a long excerpt but worth it):

It’s now possible for the first time in human history to have the economic benefits of very large organizations, things like economies of scale, and at the same time to have the human benefits of very small organizations, things like freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity. And the reason that’s possible is because a new generation of technologies – email, the World Wide Web, the internet in general – are reducing the cost of communication to such a low level that it’s now possible for huge numbers of people even in very large organizations to have enough information that they can make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from someone above them in a hierarchy who supposedly knows more than they do.

It’s the technology, by reducing the cost of communication, that’s making this possible. But just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it will necessarily happen. What I think will actually drive the change in this case are the business benefits of people making more decisions for themselves. When people are making their own decisions, for instance, they’re often more highly motivated – they’ll work harder if it’s their own thing rather than just what somebody tells them to do. When people are doing their own thing, they’re often more creative. They’re willing to be more inventive, try more things, just be more innovative. They’re able to be more flexible if they can decide what to do in their own situation instead of just following rigid rules. Finally, people who are making their own decisions often just plain like it better.

Now, those benefits of decentralized decision making aren’t important everywhere in business. In some places, like making certain kinds of semiconductor chips, the most important thing is economies of scale. And in those cases, cheap communication may lead to even more centralized decision-making, but, and here’s the key point, in our increasingly knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, the critical factors in business success are often exactly the same things as the benefits of decentralized decision making: flexibility, motivation, creativity, innovation. That’s why I think that even though it won’t happen everywhere, we’ll see  in more and more parts of our economy, more and more decentralized decision making, more and more human freedom.

Other members of the panel went on to offer examples of what this movement toward office democracy could look like in practice. Kat Steinmetz, human resources manager of Burning Man, for instance, explained that the annual gathering has six founders, but no CEO, and decisions are made by consensus. That takes longer on the front-end and can be frustrating, explained Steinmetz, but results in faster implementation as all parties really buy in to a decision once it had been made.

Or, if Burning Man seems a bit far out of the corporate sphere to be really relevant, Zach Ware, campus community development director at Zappos, offered examples of how decentralization is affecting his firm, starting with space design. Their offices, he said, have no walls, to be a literally, as well as metaphorically, flat organization, and their new Las Vegas headquarters offers both internal and external coworking spaces to nurture community.

Finally, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale shared a radical but doable example of workplace democracy in action. At Linden Lab, bonuses were crowdsourced, meaning that the 300 employees were given an equal share of the bonus pot and asked to give away the money to their colleagues in any way they saw fit. The result was a rational allocation of bonus money and a very empowered workforce, according to Rosedale.

And how about Podio? How are they experiencing this tech-driven trend away from command and control at the office? Hanscom explained in an email that, “Podio was born out of the belief that the people who do the work of companies should have the power to choose how they do that work and that software (or any work tool) has an inherent value. If you force tools and processes on them that they have not had a hand in deciding upon, you are dehumanizing, disempowering them.” Their office is also open plan, they’re flexible in terms of remote working, and “we eat lunch together every day,” says Hanscom.

Is technology bringing more democracy to your work life?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Dplanet.

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