IBM should buy Bloglines and roll it into Lotus Connections

I was once a Bloglines customer, but Google Reader surpassed them years ago. Bloglines didn’t have the money to compete; their inability to produce a good mobile product in 2008 was the last straw for me.

Happily, they’re still around. I can’t see how they survive though.

There is a better future. In my corporate life I’ve been confounded by the lack of a decent, shareable, web-based feed reader for inside-the-firewall Sharepoint and other blogs. There aren’t even any decent Windows desktop feed readers left (though I’ve not tried the astoundingly horrible Outlook 2007 reader with SP2).

IBM wants to compete in this subscription/collaboration world with Lotus Connections, but their current web reader component is less than ideal.

Bingo.

IBM acquires or licenses Bloglines and funds Active Directory integration to support Sharepoint feed integration.

Win-win.