When Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, talks to a potential new customer, the first question he asks is: “How do you share information?” The answer is typically: e-mail, or, for engineering teams downloading CAD files, an FTP server. Then, he drills down into the inefficiencies of the setup, countering, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a secure online community to collaborate with departments, vendors, and partners?”
Well, sure. But, not everybody can afford Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration platform, including, it seems, Microsoft itself.
The idea for Central Desktop, a collaboration tool delivered in a software-as-a-service model and based on Web 2.0 technology, was born out of an experience Garcia had while working at CNET Networks on a deal with Microsoft. The Redmond, WA, group, he recalls, passed around a USB key to share files and e-mailed everything back and forth after the meeting. “I remember asking why they were not using SharePoint, and their answer was, ‘We don’t have the resources.’ ”
Garcia noted that CNET also had information-sharing issues. At that moment, it all coalesced. “We all buy into this dream that it is supposed to be easy to share information with people, but it is still so damn hard,” he says. “CNET couldn’t do it as a mid-sized, publicly traded company, and Microsoft couldn’t do it as a huge, cash-rich company that makes collaboration software, because they didn’t have the resources. We needed to make it easy for companies to collaborate.”