I remember tweeting a couple of years back that I had reached 10,000 unopened emails in my Gmail account and asking if anyone else used their Gmail service as a bottomless dumping ground. From the response I received, it was clear that they do. It is, after all, a practice that Google has promoted by saying that you “never have to delete anything again” – so I don’t.

Contrast that with my work email account and having been in my current role less than a year, my Exchange mailbox has already exceeded its limits and I had to do some serious pruning the other day in order to keep on emailing. Despite the storage limits imposed (for sound financial reasons) the vast difference between Exchange and Gmail is still the tremendous speed and accuracy of the Gmail search returns and the inordinate amount of time it takes to search a work account that has a mere fraction of content.

Aside from search speed, there is some ‘exponential growth law’ at play in my Gmail inbox now as it took 4 years of usage to achieve 10,000 unopened emails and less than 18 months to achieve the next 10,000. I’m not aware that I’ve encouraged this greater influx of emails through subscribing to a lot more resources, in fact I tend to be a lot more choosy these days about what I subscribe to. Looking a bit further, it would appear that this exponential growth in emails is being driven by organisations attempting to ‘engage’ with me a lot more than they used to. Unfortunately for them however, their efforts are largely wasted as if I ignored them before, I’m still ignoring them today.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of ‘never deleting anything’ is that I have a tremendous archive of conversations that go back half a decade now and if I need to check back on something, Google’s powerful search function lets me retrieve that information in seconds. So, when I was taking a brief trip back down memory lane recently, I came across some interesting conversations from around this time 4 years ago that were part of a chain of events that ultimately culminated in this commentary titled Mediasurface and the Three Bears on what was then CMS Watch.

I remember the indignation this commentary caused at the time amongst the players involved but also thinking that it seemed a pretty incisive and fair summary of what had just happened and what the challenges would be going forward. I was reminded of this, not just by the emails from that time but also Tony Byrne choosing Valentine’s Day this year (either consciously or sub-consciously) to emphasise what buyers should watch out for in terms of good and murky practice from his fellow technology analysts.

Personally, I’m glad that my respect for Tony’s incisiveness and shrewd commentary at that time was such that I took close heed of his observations in that ‘Three Bears’ article over the more ‘charitable’ commentary around and stayed alert to the signs that indicated the direction things were likely to take.

Revisiting this article the other day, I have to say, like much that the Real Story Group produces, it was absolutely spot-on.

• The Immediacy founders undeniably cashed out (at just the right time for a simple, single language, provincial Web CMS provider – IMHO)
• Immediacy was absorbed quickly (as were previous Mediasurface acquisitions (Reef and Silver Bullet) before it)
• The acquisition was very much about ‘sales’ focus rather than any synergies between products (Mediasurface needed UK customer breadth and cross-sell/up-sell opportunities to make it look a more attractive proposition in the City)
• Immediacy customers and Mediasurface shareholders were the ones who should be concerned (It was only a matter of time for Immediacy customers to be impacted as costs and losses grew and, as for the Mediasurface shareprice, it went into free fall during 2008)

So, what has happened to those Three Bears since?…

Daddy Bear (aka Morello) found a new Mistress (aka Alterian) to play with that was a lot more exciting than the members of its own family. This new Mistress spoke of ‘relationships’ and ‘engagement’ in a brave new world of social interaction. In fact this new Mistress was so alluring that Daddy Bear has cast off his former name and joined this new family in name as well as in body.

Mummy Bear (aka Immediacy) became increasingly neglected as Daddy Bear played around with his new Mistress. Nobody speaks of Mummy Bear now and her former friends have been persuaded to follow Daddy Bear and his new Mistress to a much more exciting world of engagement, stick with her for the time being as they can’t afford to go elsewhere or have deserted her completely.

Baby Bear (aka Pepperio) grew up a little bit following this article but then got a bit troublesome and was put into care so that Daddy and Mummy Bear could go and play with new friends without Baby Bear getting in the way.

As well as reminding myself what has happened to those three Web CMS bears over the last 4 years, I have also spent this last week using three of their counterparts. This demonstrates things are still moving on a pace in the Web CMS world and emphasised the challenges that would have faced those original Three Bears had they continued as part of the same family.

The Baby Bear experience has come from setting up a Google Apps account for a colleague who runs a non-profit organisation outside of work and using Google sites to help him create and manage his web presence. Pepperio was conceived to try to enable a partner network to provide the same type of basic services to smaller organisations and from my experiences of setting up my colleague’s new site, Google Sites now offers an experience in excess of anything Pepperio provided – and for free. In fact, as an indication that ‘content management’ is well and truly commoditised now at hobbyist and small business level, my 8-year-old daughter is currently building a Doctor Who fan site using Google Sites. Watching her master the integration of YouTube videos into her very competent site design and layout brings joy to an old web veteran’s heart 😉

The Mummy Bear experience has come from finalising a new EPiServer based site. I equate EPiServer with the old Immediacy product primarily because it is a more simplistic ‘page-based’ CMS with straightforward site tree ‘mental model’. It also offers the type of interface sophistication and ease-of-use that was the essence of Immediacy. It shares some of the frustrations inherent in this type of model but has far better support for multiple languages and succeeded in developing a stronger partner base that has enhanced the core product through its ideas and innovations. Much as I would like to have seen Immediacy grow in the way EPiServer has over the last 4 years the reality is it didn’t have the heritage to compete in an increasingly internationalised and globalised web environment that its Scandinavian and other European counterparts have.

And, the Daddy Bear experience has come from using Drupal 7. As an object orientated system, Drupal equates well with the old Morello product and with the enhancements in user-friendliness of the version 7 product it is as sophisticated an editing and management environment as I remember Morello being. Presumably things have moved on with the core Morello product following the Alterian acquisition and discontinuation of Immediacy but personally I can’t see how some tacked on email marketing and analytics functions make it any more a dynamic marketing tool than the likes of EPiServer or Drupal. The key issue I remember with Morello was the challenge the development teams had in bending and twisting its dated ‘broadcast mode’ core architecture to enable bi-directional content deployment, arguably the most important aspect of a content management system that is going to deliver ‘engaging’ content. By contrast, Drupal’s ‘message board’ heritage makes it an ideal platform for creating and managing social media orientated websites.

All in all, this just goes to show that 4 years is a very long time in the Web CMS world and it takes many twists and turns. I’m thinking that the wild speculation about the fate of the current batch of vendors in my Internet World post last year is showing promise and that this year’s Web CMS show season will be interesting to watch…