We’ll release a beta version of Unison for Mac in May. You’ll be able to IM with your colleagues and share updates or docs and files in Unison ‘rooms’. Neat.

If you’d like a heads-up when the Mac version is available, click on Mac / iOS / Android at the top of our homepage. (We’re also hard at work on mobile versions, so we can update you on those too.)

Please note that themes are listed by frequency of mentions in Jobs’ keynote speech:

Some Unisoners (need a better word for that) went to TechCrunch Disrupt this week. We had some very interesting meetings with potential customers and industry people.

Chatted to Stowe Boyd about ‘collaboration’ versus newer terms like ‘work media’ – and how we can make people understand what Unison is.

Talked to lots of startups, many of whom have been looking for something like Unison: one guy said “I’ve spent three years looking for something like this – we have a distributed team and we need it badly!”

The biggest lesson I took from TechCrunch is that few startups are focusing on businesses. They are disproportionately developing consumer apps, in the hopes of hitting a home run with ‘the next big thing’. Far too little is being invested in technology to make our work lives easier. So that’s good news for Unison.

We’re hoping that Unison will end (at least some of) the tyranny of base-touching that happens in offices worldwide.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/companys-employees-spend-entire-day-touching-base,19776/

We’ll keep the good bits, like simplicity and ease of use, but ditch the business-inappropriate bits, like silly bright colors, bouncy sound effects and wacky usernames. (My friend is an Oxford professor, but his Skype name is a variant on ‘MrBean’. He doesn’t use it for work.)

So, we proudly announce… Unison for Outlook.

Outlook is already one of the better apps to use at work – it’s effective at what it does. But we made it better. Unison for Outlook is a plugin that gives you a contact list, free/busy status, IM, calls, videochat and shared ‘walls’ – directly inside Outlook.

The user interface is simple. We didn’t throw in tons of features and buttons. It’s just a hassle-free way to talk to your colleagues, with one mouse click. Rather than reading this, though, you should just go and try it out.

The longer version goes like this:

We tried something new in 2008

When we launched in 2008, we were riding high on our new, fresh, unified approach to business communications. We had a client-server software system (Unison Desktop and Unison Server) that combined phone, email, IM and other things into one neat system. And we were based on Linux, which was also on a tear as people started to question whether they truly needed Windows anymore. And we offered it free (FREEEE!) which we hoped was a surefire winner.

But it did not work out

People didn’t want a new-fangled alternative, no matter how cool it was. They didn’t want to throw out their existing telecoms and email systems. They didn’t want take a chance on something different and risky. And they didn’t want another on-premise system to manage – they just wanted simplicity. So, after a while, we shelved the old Unison client-server product.

We learned some lessons from our failure

1. Challenge your assumptions aggressively
   We placed bets that were wrong and did not challenge the assumptions underlying them: we thought that on-premise servers and software would continue to be sold for some time; we thought that new features could overcome the inertia behind Microsoft Outlook; and we thought our business software’s low cost could overcome a lack of reputation. Wrong, wrong and wrong.
2. Don’t spend a long time building, before validating
   We spent a couple of years building software… that customers didn’t want.
3. Simple is always better
   Simplify the customer experience to the absolute minimum. Don’t make them think, don’t make them work, don’t give them features unless you know that 90% of users will actively use and like them.

So we pivoted and made something new and cool

We realized two important things: first, Microsoft Outlook was not going anywhere; and second, end users and not IT people were gaining control of business software. So we made Unison for Outlook, a superfantastic plugin that extends Outlook with lots of new capabilities, but is simple to use. More on that in our next post, Unison for Outlook, a superfantastic plugin. If you just want to try it, go here to download Unison.