Questions on Cross-Organizational Calendaring, Sep 6

In my series on the key technology underpinnings of an IT environment that enhances team productivity, Pillar 4 focused on coordinating schedules with team-aware scheduling software. I argued that today's calendaring and scheduling capabilities are broken, because (a) a user has to manually reconcile multiple calendars to work out where they have to be at a certain time, (b) free-and-busy searches do not take into consideration all of the calendar instances that impact a user, and (c) calendaring and scheduling doesn't work across organizational boundaries.

So here's my question: If you could solve these three problems, how much would you be willing to pay on an annual basis for the service? Obviously the service would have to meet your security requirements and be sufficiently extensible to interoperable with the wide variety of software clients that people in your network make use of, but if that was the case, would you be willing to put money on the table to solve the calendaring problem for you?

If yes, at what level would you be willing to pay?
(a) Up to $10 per year
(b) Up to $25 per year
(c) Up to $50 per year
(d) Up to $100 per year
(e) Over $100 per year

Please leave a comment below, or drop me an email. I'll collate the responses and publish the result set if there are sufficient responses.

Comments

[james governor]

if it works i would happily pay - what $10 a month....

they keyword is "if".

at redmonk we have been covering this from the issue.
http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000905.html

another way to look at the pricing perspective. the calendar service could eveb be free, a loss leader. if it worked users would migrate for that function, and pay for other elements in a stack. so for pillar4 the partnering opportunities are obvious.

[Michael Sampson]

James,
Thanks for the data point. Interesting. I think we have to solve this problem initially as a "service-in-the-sky", and I see that you have written something equivalent, hence I don't think the "loss leader" angle works.
M.

[Michael Sampson]

A data point from a friend:

"You asked on Shared Spaces about reservation price for calendaring software. My own feeling was $10 per person per month. But I sent the query to our resource director for whom this is a real pain that we don't have a solution. He likened the value of calendaring to mobile phone subscriptions and estimated a reservation price around UK£20 per person per month. I hope this data is useful for your survey."