The history of collaboration tools for business is often mistakenly associated with social networks. The truth is that these tools existed before the first social networking site appeared. Collaboration tools have more in common with early chat programs than anything else does. It is these early chat programs that allowed collaboration tools to become as functional and popular as they are now.
1. Social networks - individual needs
Collaboration tools were influenced by social networks, most notably chat programs. These programs were generated to allow people to talk to each other and not necessarily for business purposes. However, smart business owners started to use the systems to communicate to their business partners because it was much easier than communicating by phone. The interruptions were also far less because the phone was not ringing. The chat systems only made noises when messages came in, then they stayed silent until the business owner was ready to answer them. The only way that they made an obnoxious noise is when someone "buzzed" another person (which meant that it was an important message that should not be ignored).
2. Sharing needed to happen on networks
What business owners found by using these systems is that they needed to share files. The old way of sharing files was to send them via e-mail. However, this did not always work because some files were too big to send via the e-mail. Business owners then turned to their own websites to upload the information. This did not help in the long run because the bandwidth of a server would be used up quickly and the amount of steps it took to upload the project to the website was far too much. This caused businesses to develop file sharing through the chat programs. This helped, but there were still problems (and sometimes persist until today) because the files would overwrite (accidently at times) the work that the business owner had done on the file when the other partner sent their version over. There was also the problem of both sides doing the same work at the same time. The newer systems have fail-safes to make sure that these problems no longer happen.
3. Further tweaks by users
Nowadays, there is persistent chat with file sharing. These systems have also learned from the social networking platforms. They have also implemented some of those systems in their offerings as well. The truth about the systems is that they are getting better and better over time because they are learning what business owners need to have when they work. They are still not optimized for the business experience (because these programs are developed by people who do not do business) but they are much better than the older forms of collaboration tools.
Collaboration tools were heavily influenced by the early chat programs. These programs allowed two people (or entities) to communicate and discuss how to work together. The businesses making the chat programs learned what the business owners needed and started to develop more custom build programs that would eventually become the collaboration tools we have today.
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