The work management company Socialcast, a VMware company, has announced that the project-based Strides product is being retired at the end of July, now that the company’s flagship Socialcast product supports project-based work. This includes the objective-based work organization of Strides, so users of Socialcast can have all the benefits of both tools. Apparently there is a migration path — to move Strides data into Socialcast — but it is not automatic, so customers have to contact Socialcast for more assistance.

In related news, VMware continues to back out of the social application/social enterprise space with the sale of Zimbra to Telligent. Zimbra, an email, calendar, and collaboration tool, was acquired from Yahoo in 2010. When VMware sold off online slide creation/presentation tool Sliderocket in January many analysts suggested that was a very different thing than Zimbra or Socialcast. My best is that VMware realignment will ultimately lead to the sale of Socialcast as VMware retrenches and fights for a position in the very hot server virtualization world.

I discovered over the weekend that Americans lost over $37 billion (in 2010) in lost productivity waiting for the cable guy or dishwasher repair. In case we needed a financial as opposed to social argument for being able to work at home. And that’s only at $15/hour of lost work.