At the Enterprise 2.0 conference
main stage, vendor presentations were classic Marketing 1.0. IBM had added a new
social computing bundle, and the mashup environment looked promising. Microsoft drove everybody from the room with
a “death by PowerPoint” presentation that was uninspired. SAP came across looking absolutely swell
following MSFT. Cisco’s vision and
offerings seemed overblown and heavy, especially when compared with the
beautifully simple presentation of Dr. Milton Chen of VSee Lab. Milton did a "when is a smile a
smile” demo of VSee's free videoconferencing and appsharing service in the workshop “10% technology, 90% people” moderated by Jessica Lipnack of NetAge.
The nature of Web 2.0 is that knowledge workers are not “end-users” anymore. They are "Web Practitioners” , not passive recipients of whatever the IT department bought this year, but an active professional with their own network of colleagues, and needing to grasp and assemble a variety of collaboration and communication tools to do work and innovate, more often than not in an “extra-prise,” not solely enterprise context.
Many of the corporate-style presentations at E 2.0 were oriented with classic
messages to IT Directors and CIOs, designed more as a sop to the status quo, than providing vision and
leadership in regards to the impact the these technologies have on collaboration and innovation. The tone of the presentations seemed to be
the software industry’s response along the lines of HAL to Dave, the astronaut, when he tried to get back on
the mother-ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey “I’m
afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
What the
Enterprise 2.0 attendees needed to see was some clear examples of how their
offerings enabled this new class of “Web Practitioner. “ Seeing is believing, and next year, all of
them should bring a couple of “Web 2.0 Practioners” to the
main stage with them with real-life examples.
Web 2.0 is the about power of the participative network, allowing collective intelligence to flourish through increased transparency and interaction. The consumer and SMB market may be showing the way, unfettered by the inertia of prior infrastructures. One-way corporate vendor messages do not exemplify the impact of the relational web, but sound like HAL-speak.
Daisy, Daisy...
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