Irregulars – Page 7

Early market test data coming in…

Over on the Itensil blog, I posted a note about early user adoption. To summarize, we’ve begun our Early Access Program for interested users. We’ve employed a useful web lead generation tool called Salesbuilder to categorize and qualify the interested parties in the product. For me, as a researcher, the early data coming in is interesting.

I was particularly alarmed by the answers to this question: User Adoption

Over 50% of the qualified leads were not able to get a product evaluated by the team that would benefit by using it. A mere 19% were. And there’s no guarantee, the product was adopted post-evaluation.

Although the data is not yet statistically significant, it’s an early warning sign to all Enterprise 2.0 vendors that user adoption is going to be a challenge for many enterprises. For this reason, I’m starting to think it’s in the best interests of the community to start educating and enlightening its target communities on the benefits of ALL enterprise 2.0 solutions.

I think Jeff Nolan was onto an idea like this… I will contact him and report what I find. In the meantime, I’m recommending all e2.0 vendors start accumulating data about their customer’s trials and tribulations while adopting or trying to adopt e2.0 products. If web 2.0 is truly about content, collaboration, and community– we will all benefit from eachother’s experiences, yes?

More user adoption… and so it begins!

Three items of note, coming in from the mainstream tech media. CNet, CIO Magazine and eWeek have recent enterprise 2.0 stories showcasing web 2.0 technologies at use or in trials at major corporations. I’m particularly interested in the American Express experiment:

From CNet:

American Express is experimenting with internal use of wikis. On its customer-facing web site, it uses RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, to deliver information, and the company’s web site invites its customers to provide feedback to influence product design, said Bob Morgan, vice president of technology strategy at American Express. We’re interested (in Web technollogies)– there’s clearly some applicability. And we want to give customers the sense of community feedback,” Morgan said.

I had an excellent chat with Indus Khaitan who’s part of a marketing group at Symantec.* Three and half years ago he launched a stealth internal blog on an old server they had in the department. He’s become somewhat of a renegade, internal web 2.0 “go to guy” for blogging and wikis today. He inspired not only his team to belly up to the web 2.0 bar, but an Executive VP who now has 700-800 readers on his blog. Khaitan has done all this under the radar of the IT department. “IT was busy on other projects,” he said. The truth is, he didn’t need IT. His department has virally caught on to the web 2.0 tools and now collaborate on campaigns and other projects. Sometimes he gets roped into helping colleagues hone their blogging or wiki skills, but he doesn’t mind. “It only takes about 15-20 minutes,” he said. He thinks the wiki is a great platform and he’s already coined a new term for its newfound popularity: the writable intranet.

These stories, in addition to forward-thinking IT groups, are how enterprise 2.0 will begin to spread virally throughout the enterprise.

*Although clearly Khaitan just got busy with web 2.0 on his own, I found it ironic that Symantec is self-described as “the global leader in information security and availability” considering some recent flak e2.0 has gotten on security issues. See Alex Barnett‘s blog post yesterday.

McAfee’s “Empty Quarter,” mind meld, and backlash.

I was encouraged when McAfee wrote about how his new Harvard graduates would be coming into the workforce with an “I want my ~~MTV~~ Internet” attitude. This sentiment is what I’ve actually been trying to get across here and here. His latest post on the “Empty Quarter” is even closer to my personal experience researching the Computerworld story on Enterprise 2.0. (Incidentally, there is excellent commentary from Microsoft’s Alex Barnett on McAfee’s Empty Quarter post.)

But like I told Dion Hinchcliffe a while back… be prepared for the backlash. As talk of real Enterprise 2.0 starts trickling outside the echo chamber, we’re going to start seeing some real negativity. Rod Boothby and Tom Davenport were debating its merits here. And McAfee got slashdotted here for his efforts in evangelizing.

The flipside to this negativity is the positive experience I had recently while visiting an Interactive Agency, Avenue A| Razorfish (AARF). Clearly, this firm “gets it.” The company is delivering Enterprise 2.0 solutions (despite the backlash) to their Global brands. The firm also eats its dogfood. The company uses a wiki (MediaWiki) to collaborate. Interesting enough, the way to the corporate user-adoption nerve center may be through the Chief Marketing Officer, not the CIO. Better- a collaborative effort between these two executives. Even though, today, AARF is focused on building consumer brands, the firm survived the dotcom bust by building and implementing enterprise portals behind the firewall. That experience goes far to explain how AARF can converse easily with advisors, employees/clients, and knowledge workers who are expecting the same experience in the Enterprise world as they have in the consumer world. “Technology is an enabler,” said Amy Vickers, who is heading up AARF’s enterprise solutions. “There is a robust set of flexible combinations… users are more empowered to have a voice and IT manages the collaborative effort between business and technology,” she said.

This is where web 2.0 meets enterprise 2.0. What’s changed is the consumer taking control of the brand conversation, according to Vickers. But in the enterprise all users are “consumers.” Bob Lord, the East Coast President for AARF said, “IT is put on notice. No longer is it a blackbox mentality. The corporate knowledge worker is saying, ‘I can do this on Amazon, why can’t I get someone’s address?'”

As the evangelizing starts to move its way into the empty quarter, it may be coming in the front door (CMO) as well as the back (IT). It’s more about demand than supply, in other words.

Along these lines, industry leading B2Bonline has a cover story on web 2.0 today. I found this quote interesting:

Weber [Larry Weber, chairman-CEO of W2 Group] said this latest iteration of the Web makes the Internet “very emotive.”

“It’s not a channel anymore,” he said. “B-to-b marketers need to understand the profound impact this platform will have in their buying and selling, and in their relationships with customers. The job of marketers in b-to-b today is to be that of an aggregator of products, trends, issues, events and communities.”

He said marketers will need to venture beyond their own sites to other Web destinations where customers congregate. “A lot of the b-to-b companies don’t understand that they have to go out to other people’s `parties,’ ” he said. “It’s just like networking in the physical world. You have to start going out so that the community comes back to you as well.”

The Joe Kraus Q&A : Better Late?

I had the pleasure of sitting at dinner with Joe Kraus, CEO JotSpot, at the Enterprise Irregulars dinner last month. Kraus is a pioneer in the Enterprise 2.0 “movement,” much like Ross Mayfield, CEO SocialText, Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, and others. I asked him if he would do a Q&A on my blog, and he agreed. The rumor of the evening was that JotSpot was to be acquired by Yahoo. I asked him about that, and he unequivocally denied it. As we all know now, the suitor was none other than the 400-lb gorilla, Google. Good for Joe.

The interview is still provides excellent lessons learned from a pioneering Next Net strategic thinker.

Joe Kraus Q&A, 10/24/06

I’ve heard you say before that JotSpot is trying to start a DIY revolution. If that’s the case– who are we revolting against? And how will we know we’ve won?

My general view is the biggest technological revolutions have been do it yourself (DIY). And whether it’s the personal computer which was DIY computing– taking computing out of the hands of experts and giving it to everyday people; desktop publishing– which was taking publishing out of the hands of experts giving it to everyday people, or podcasting– taking radio essentially out of the hands of experts and giving it to everyday people. Those are the powerful revolutions where big, mass phenomenons occur. I think that the web has been a DIY publishing revolution for about a dozen years whether you trace it to HTML to ms front page, geocities, yahoo groups, blogging wikis that’s all really an evolution of the DIY publishing world. I think there’s a new revolution coming that’s called DIY applications.I think you see it with JotSpot’s vision; you see it with Dabble DB, Coghead—you basically see this notion of ‘how do you enable normal or non-technical, or maybe just slightly technical or technically-leaning person to be able to make a place online not where somebody reads something, but where somebody does something.’

I think that any time you are having any kind of DIY revolution, the thing you are revolting against are two things: expertise and capital.So if you look at the PC/desktop publishing/podcasting revolution, you are looking to revolt against the expertise required to do the thing enabled. Podcasting is enabling people who are not experts in broadcasting over FM signals, allowing them to get their message out in a form that previously would have been acceptable to them. Second thing it revolts against is the need to have a lot of capital to do that.You don’t need a radio station to get your signal out.You’re revolting against the expertise required to make an application typically involved with folks that maybe know statically typed or dynamic languages like Java or C++ or pearl or python.And you’re revolting against the capital required in paying experts to build those programs.

And in terms of how do you know when you’ve won?I think you know when you’ve won when Today, you’re average person at your small business doesn’t hesitate to take excel and make a customer list.I think the day that somebody just assumes that you should be able to make a simple application and take it for granted? I think you know you’ve won.When it becomes invisible is the time you know you’ve won. Take search for example, you didn’t take that for granted a dozen or so years ago.It’s a testament to ‘now you know the Internet is here to stay.’

What is your advice to startups? Is there anything you would have done differently?

Let me talk about something I would have done for sure differently at JotSpot. I’ve come to no longer believe in betas. More specifically what I mean is far too often companies put their product in beta, but don’t put their business model in beta. Jotspot did that. We put our product in beta at the first web 2.0 conference.But we didn’t simultaneously test our business model.We got a lot of product feedback, but we learned nothing in the four, five, six months of beta time about whether our business model was going to fly.In particular, not the notion of subscriptions of not, but the notion of what is the metric of value that people care about?Is it users? pages? wikis?; is it file size storage? and the only way you learn is by doing.

So my advice to startups in this particular category is if you’re going to put your product in beta—put your business model in beta with it. Far too often we are too product focused and not business-model focused. That’s one thing I definitely would have done differently with JotSpot.

Can you describe JotSpot’s “heavy user?”

Heavy user? I think about the adoption process where wikis in companies get very sticky.”Heavy users” come from wikis starting in a small group. In a classic adoption pattern, you have a small group and a champion who’s maybe going to run a new project. The champion decides that instead of passing information around overemail, we’re going to create a wiki where it’s a centralized repository where we take our notes, put our feedback, store our files, and it’s basically a project wiki.And that person is so enthusiastic about it he’s able to carry the day and get his team members or her team members to participate.

Once they start participating they say, hey this is a much better way of doing things.That project is hopefully successful in the company and peers say, ‘how did you do that?’ or they are invited into the wiki as a way of being briefed on what’s going on and they see it and they bring it to their category and start new projects using this technology.And off it goes, to ultimately become the intranet or the tool by which all information inside the company is managed with each group having their own section of the wiki.

That has been the adoption curve for every heavy user that we’ve got be it companies like Leapfrog which make children’s toys and uses JotSpot across the entire company to manage the company… British Telecom… similar adoption process.

Rumors abound over JotSpot’s potential suitors. Is it your intention to sell?

I think any time you build a company designed to be sold, you ultimately get less value if it’s sold. You reduce the number of options that you have. If I as a suitor know you have no options, why would I pay any kind of money for you? If on the other hand, I think you do have a chance at being a successful independent entity, I should probably pay up now because the cost of acquiring you later might be too great. So my view is, the answer to this question should always be, ‘you are building to be a large, sustainable independent company.’

But to recognize that at any time in the company’s life there’s a risk/reward curve and if somebody’s willing to pay off of that curve, you should at least hear that discussion. That’s my rational view on the topic. Is it your intention to sell? No, we intend to be an independent company. But there’s always a price at which you would sell unless you’re totally emotional about the topic which leads to its own set of problems.

My general view on this is Americans are optimists. My favorite quote on this was a Times/CNN poll in the year 2000. When asked the question: “Are you in the top 1% of earners, 19% of people said yes and a full 20% said they would be.” So a full 39% of Americans believe they are or will be in the top 1% of earners in the country which is a testament to optimism as a shared cultural foundation.I think that’s even more pointed in Silicon Valley. Every time a YouTube gets bought, a Delicious gets bought, a Flickr gets bought everybody believes they are going to be in that category. As a result you have a whole host of companies designed to be sold which I think is a dangerous thing.

Truthfully while there is a whole lot of innovation in this web 2.0 cycle because it’s so much cheaper to make companies these days or build products and bring them to market, I think that if you don’t design to be independent, most likely you’re not going to have a good outcome.

What was a key turning point in JotSpot’s history? The eBay relationship?

We started 3 and a half years ago. In hindsight, at Excite, we had some very pivotal episodes measured in the span of weeks or days where deals done that altered the trajectory of the company that were make or break moments. I don’t know what those are here yet.I look at the eBay thing as an important relationship for us and a highly valued one. One that took JotSpot from… we no longer have the questions of, “Can you scale? Can you deploy? Again, it’s a large public site. Having the eBay security team vetting you is certainly another mark of validation.But different than the Excite case (the Netscape distribution deal) which allowed the company to go public… having had those moments, it’s a little tough to put eBay in that category.

Maybe my standards are too strict. I do think an interesting turning point was when I first saw a wiki. It was one of those aha moments like the Internet in 1993. It was a great technology useful for so many things, but trapped in the land of the nerds.

Is JotSpot targeting enterprise users and how are they defined?

To me it’s more about business users. Because I believe wikis are most useful in the service of business and the reason that is that wikis require trust. If you’re going to allow people to self-edit that requires trust. If you’re going to allow people to edit stuff themselves you’ve got to trust them. There are very few examples of open Internet trust with the exception of Wikipedia.It’s hard to build trust on the open Internet. At work it’s easy to build trust because everybody’s working for the same company you know who people are in general and, their edits are signed/marked, and there are repercussions if you do something really bad, e.g., you can get fired.So trust is easier to provide in businesses. There is an inherent need to collaborate inside of businesses. And that’s why I think JotSpot is really focused on business cases rather than Wetpaint or Wikia which are focused on consumer cases.

Finally the reason that is the consumer use model requires an indirect payment model—typically they’re advertising-based.In order to be successful in that space you have to have a ton of page views because it’s a scale business. It’s a winner-takes-all high scale kind of business.That’s why we’re focused from a business model POV on businesses because they’re willing to pay directly as opposed to indirectly through advertising.

How do you define enterprise?

There are definitely requirements between an SMB, say with 10 employees, and a company with 250 employees and a company of several thousand employees. But, given the adoption model of Wikis, and the pricing model that we have that facilitate the bottom up adoption, the workgroup of ten people that adopts the product say, at British Telecom, looks a whole lot like the company of ten. So, the feature set at the first point of adoption. The question becomes as you get bigger and bigger inside the company, then you start to get issues around integration with existing systems, authentication, single sign-on, backup, etc.

What is the “value metric” related to enterprise 2.0 apps?

In the end, it has to relate to cost-savings, increased revenue or an indirect measure of that like productivity.Businesses only do things for two reasons either they save money or they make money, and then again, indirect measure of that, productivity for example. My view on office 1.0 is it was all centered around productivity.Microsoft was all about making you more productive. It was very individual-oriented. At the center of Office 2.0 is collaboration. This is why I think wikis are a fundamental tool of that.

In the end, I think collaboration however measured is to do things more efficiently and accurately.The end metric has to be productivity—that’s the one that most affects the top and bottom line. And the reason productivity is increased in this instance is not because I can write the document faster, but because I can share the document more efficiently and faster.

How do you position JotSpot against its competitors?

The big difference between JotSpot and traditional wiki vendors is JotSpot is a collaborative applications platform that is designed to allow you to build your own collaborative applications if you want.Or build a variety of collaborative applications inside the same environment. Most wikis are just collaborative web pages. JotSpot is trying through its collaborative applications platform is apply the wiki metaphor of moving the web from a monologue to a dialogue to the familiarity people have with the traditional office applications.

So, in a traditional wiki, when you create a new you can only create one kind of page which is a web page.It has no structure on it; so if you wanted to put a calendar on a wiki, it doesn’t look like Outlook anymore and it you lose all the structured information, i.e., a calendar event, start and end times, does it repeat?… If you want to move an Excel spreadsheet into a wiki, typically you lose all of the ability to do any of the sorting that you might do. If you had an action item list, you could no longer like you could in Excel, sort it, now it’s nice that it’s in a wiki page, a web page, that’s shareable, but at the same time, you lose a lot of the ability that you have in Excel. In JotSpot, when you create a page, you get to select from a whole range of wiki page types as we call them. If you want to create a wiki spreadsheet, a wiki to do list, a wiki calendar—those actually look like the applications you would expect them to look like and act like those applications, but you bring a wiki metaphor to them so they’re shared and under the same version model.

That’s the big difference between us and every body else and traditional wiki vendors.So you rarely run out of steam with JotSpot. The difference between us and the office 2.0 vendors is in the case of something like if you’re going head to head against MS and Office 2.0 or you’re trying to bring Office online, I think you are committing suicide. I think MS has a long, long time because consumer habits die really hard. They take a long time to die. Just take Mapquest vs. Yahoo or Google maps. Google and Yahoo maps are really superior, but they are still dwarfed in share by Mapquest because people don’t change that quickly. And if you don’t think people will change quickly in maps, how slow do you think they’ll change something like Office? The tools we’ve used daily for a decade or more. You’re not changing all that fast.

So to move office online I think to move those applications online is pure suicide, esp. if you’re not a deep-pocketed company. Google I give a shot to because it’s got to go head to head, it’s got the deep pockets, it’s got the will and the staying power, and it’s got the brand to do so. Jotspot’s approach to this is we’ll never survive on our own. So, let’s base our offering which is broader than traditional wiki vendors, because it offers things like calendaring and spreadsheets, but oriented around a wiki so it’s something new. The early adopter market is focused on that right now– not trying to go after the main market by moving traditional office productivity apps right online.

What do you love (and hate) about running a next generation Internet company?

There’s a bunch of stuff I love about stuff costing a lot less. Excite took $3m dollars to get some ideas to get to market and JotSpot took about $100K. I love that fact. To me the definition of web 2.0 is really about cheap innovation. It’s cheap innovation because whether it’s computers being cheaper or it’s open source software meaning your software on top of which you build your software is now free be it from MySQL to your operating system to your web server or your app server or via adwords that allow you to get to niche markets very cheaply and efficiently… be it off shore labor—a little company like JotSpot having people in Romania, Germany, India whereas when Excite was formed there was no chance of having access to that—that all has made cheap innovation possible because it’s so much cheaper to bring products to market. That’s great.

There are consequences too.It’s cheaper for competitors to get to market too. You have a much more frenetic marketplace whereas before, with more capital required you end up having fewer competitors then it’s great for consumers. While a lot of these companies will not make it because of either the intense competition or just the natural fate of startups—too early for the market, missing the market, etc., I think the fact that there are more competitors always benefits customers in the end. I like that for the most part there’s a sense of trying to create, that the business model is equation is important at the very beginning. And that people are trying to figure that out.

There’s essentially some rationalism in both entrepreneurs and to some degree, funders. I think some of that is starting to erode both caused by two things: the more acquisitions are done in an eye-ball oriented environment. People want to fund eye-ball oriented companies. Nothing’s actually wrong with that. I just think your chances are low when.To me the question of YouTube being bought for 1.6 billion dollars is not a question of ‘did they pay too much?’ It’s ‘how could the ninth most popular site on the web only be worth $1.6 billion?’ So I like some of the rationalism that’s involved.

That flows through to employees I think that people have expectations I remember in the 90s there was a huge sense of entitlement for employees. Despite there are so many companies coming up, the pace of entitlement has not come up with it. One of the things that is difficult is continues to finding great talent. But what has amazed me is how Google has maintained as a 9,000 person company a reputation, and has the ability to acquire amazing people who historically are only startup people. Startup people who are willing to go to an 8-9000 people company and believe that it will be just like a small company, but with the reach and financial resources of a company like Google.

What do you hate about it?

I think that somehow in this environment, Silicon Valley is a bit of an echo chamber. I think it’s even more so in this environment somehow. That we risk all talking to ourselves and I am.I think that that is a good thing on some level, but a bad thing if your employees feel that praise in the echo chamber—of the “web 2.0 crowd”—is equivalent to business success that is bad.It’s not a hate; it’s a risk. I feel there is a clubbiness about web 2.0 and has some real assets because it’s smart people thinking ahead, but the truism of that is being early is the same as being wrong. The other danger is if your employees feel that praise is the same as business model success then you’re not guiding people the right way.

Atlass(t)ian! Why I luv’em.

I met Mike Cannon-Brookes at the Office 2.0 Enterprise Irregulars’ (EIs) dinner for the first time (Atlassian sponsored the dinner for the EIs). Joe Kraus (CEO, Jotspot) encouraged me to talk to him; Kraus said he had a great company, and I should meet him. I talked to Cannon-Brookes briefly that night, but took the initiative to follow up with him the next day.

I ambled over to the Atlassian station, and first started talking to Anthony Rethans, a biz dev guy responsible for OEM relationships. Rethans started telling me general info about the company. He said that the company had over 4500 customers and that about 2000 of those were Confluence customers (Atlassian’s Enterprise Wiki) and the remainder were Jira customers. Jira was Atlassian’s first product– bug-tracking software. He said half of the Fortune 100 were using an Atlassian product. That got my attention.

As I was talking to Rethans, Cannon-Brookes came by. I asked him to show me the product, and I kept asking questions. Cannon-Brookes started showing me Confluence, but the more questions I asked, the more I was more interested in the success of the business than the product itself.

Cannon-Brookes told me the firm has well over a hundred thousand users on the product, and they’re prepping to announce a “scalable” solution (Confluence Massive) that will boost the company’s capacity to handle large accounts. Even today, he said, “IBM has over 15,000 users on the product.”

The facts, according to Atlassian, on the company’s stellar growth are the following:

Mike and Scott

At 22 years old, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, his college mate from University of New South Wales (Sydney) started the company with a credit-card investment. To date, the company has taken in no outside investment and all growth is wholly organic. Estimates on the company’s revenues after four years in business are $15 million.
From the beginning, the company experienced over 40% growth every quarter, until the past year or so, but it’s still barrelling along at about 20% per quarter in keeping with its size.
Although the company spends some money on marketing, i.e., online marketing and a modest event-marketing program, the company’s success has mostly been word-of-mouth.
The company has no debt.
The company asserts that, “We sell a LOT of software. Licenses, one at a time,” according to Cannon-Brookes. An estimated 98% of the company’s revenue comes from software, not service contracts.
The split between Atlassian’s two products, Confluence and Jira is roughly 40/60, with Confluence growing faster.
The company employs 65 employees (the majority are software engineers)– 50 in Sydney, 12 in San Francisco, and 6 in Malasia.
Atlassian releases 4 major releases every year, and about a dozen minor ones.
There are over 200 plug-ins for the product which are shared at the discretion of the customer to the Atlassian community.
Atlassian’s pricing can be found on its web site. Although the product is not open source, customers receive the source code with the purchase of a license.

Why do I love this company? They’re the first real example of an Enterprise 2.0 company succeeding in every way– financially (profitable, with no backing); widespread user adoption; a simple, but effective business model; steady growth, and a unique corporate culture to boot. In addition, they’re NOT from Silicon Valley, they’re Australian.

As a matter of fact, some of the typical analyst-type questions I was firing at the management was received with a shrug. In essence, they didn’t care what the answer was, or they really didn’t know. I loved that! They weren’t rude or pretentious; they shrugged those questions off– because they could. The biggest obstacle Cannon-Brookes said he was facing currently was managing the growth of the business.

The rap on Atlassian surrounds the issue of whether or not they’re candid about their revenues and customers, whether they’re truly Enterprise 2.0 (as their solutions are not on-demand, but rather the old school model of download, install, and maintain), and that they have a network of relationships with resellers and systems integrators for service.

I did my own fact-checking, and I have not changed my mind. I think this company has tremendous potential and should be an inspiration to every vendor participating in the next wave of Enterprise software.

This year’s ITSinsider e2.0, “Rock Stars of the year” goes to the boys from Atlassian. If you have a success story (still in progress) that can trump this one– let me know. I’m interested.

Revolutionary holdout… Maybe Bowie not Lennon. Definitely not Lenin.

What time is it when a consultant blogs? Time to turn and face the strain.

I heard Andrew McAfee say recently that he doesn’t think we’re involved in a revolution; that it’s more of a transformation. Sigh. I need to go on the record saying I respectfully disagree. He said revolutions are generally short and violent. (I’m paraphrasing.) To try and make my argument, I did what I normally do in these situations, I researched “revolution” on Wikipedia. I won’t argue the violent observation, but the short I will. Take the American Revolution, for instance. It lasted 9 years from 1774-1783. More importantly, it was a war for independence and overthrowing existing societal and governmental order. Am I the only one seeing the similarities here? Am I wrong, perhaps?

From Wikipedia:
1774–1783: the American Revolution establishes independence of the thirteen North American colonies from Great Britain, creating the republic of the United States of America. A war of independence in that it created one nation from another, it was also a revolution in that it overthrew an existing societal and governmental order: the Colonial government in the Colonies.

In fairness, I caught the revolutionary bug from Joe Kraus whom I interviewed for an article on the disintermediation of high-priced consultants due to SaaS applications in the enterprise.

JotSpot CEO, Joe Kraus admits, “JotSpot is trying to enable a Do-It-Yourself revolution. When you give people the ability to do something that previously only experts could do, I think very interesting things happen.” Kraus doesn’t think the impact will be overnight, however. He believes the adoption of the new technologies will take about five years. “I think we generally tend to over-estimate the impact of technologies in the short term and radically under-estimate them in the long-term. There’s a lot of racket and fear that this is going to displace traditional consulting, and my answer would be, in the short term, I don’t think so, but in the long term, I think there’s more risk.”

Yes, we’re transforming the enterprise with new alternatives, but there is an undercurrent of shall-I-say… Raging against the Machine… that is driving the move to self-help applications. I’ve been harping on the socio-cultural underpinnings on the “movement” and the freedom of choice that web 2.0 applications provide to users for months now. For whatever their reason (I hate Outlook, Excel, SAP, Oracle, fillintheblank for xxx reason), users are turned off by the establishment’s choices and are psychologically primed to look at alternatives. That smacks of revolution– not transformation.

Along these lines, before the rumors broke about Google and YouTube, I had wanted to publish some commentary from my old friend, Richard Holway. I’ve never known an analyst to be as prescient as Richard. Here’s what Richard (who publishes for the UK market) had to say about the ch-ch-changes taking place in today’s enterprise and for today’s enterprise suppliers.

McAfee is an incredibly bright guy. I’m ashamed to admit I disagree with him, but for ITSinsiders who’ve known me over the years, I have a hard time not stating my opinion. And, also for the record: Lord knows, I’ve been wrong before. But if I’m right, I feel we’re missing something more deeply philosophical in our discussions of Enterprise 2.0. It frames how truly remarkable this wave of “next net” is. I heard a lot of this talk during web 1.0 from digital evangelists who were inspired to subvert the prevailing paradigm. Today, we have the tools and the passion. The sad truth is, we won’t see the results until widespread user adoption takes root. This is something I’m sure McAfee and I can agree on.