ebizQ's Business Agility Watch

I'm kind of wondering here if we are entering another frightening dot com boom. This news last night was that the Corporate Executive Board has completed its purchase of ITtoolbox for $58.9 million. That's a lot of clams for a community of people who basically blog in order to interact professionally with others. Sort of like a Facebook for professionals, except with less security, less fun, and no transparency about other people's credentials or knowledge about whether they're being paid or not?

(James McGovern says that ITtoolbox is now worth all that was paid for it because of the strong community that was built on compensation for traffic. "...bloggers were rewarded for how much traffic they drove to the site. When I blogged on this platform, they use to reward me $200 to $400 a month. Maybe the compensation should have been a lot higher.")

This huge buy is followed by last week's purchase by Citrix of XenSource, an open source virtualization provider for half a billion dollars. You've got to be kidding me.

ebizQ's Dennis Byron had the following to say about Citrix/Xen:

$500 million? I fear the dot.com era is returning. The bet is on buzz, not reality. In betting on virtualization, investors are paying no attention to the effects of functional convergence that is always occuring in the IT market (e.g., web servers into app servers during the dot.com era, word processors into office suites before that, virtualization BACK into operating systems in the next few years), Developrs are going to be distracted by the buzz and some real good ideas are going to get left on the cutting room floor.

But I digress: ebizQ has its own little community of bloggers which is sort of like ITtoolbox, called ITGumbo, and now I'm wondering what THAT'S worth! That's where ebizQ found Open Source Unleashed blogger Alex Fletcher, an Open Source technology optimization analyst whose excellent posts are now syndicated on ebizQ. ITGumbo way more fun than ITtoolbox too, and it even has a weekly comic strip called Mumbo Gumbo, written by Leah Archibald.