Head in the Cloud: Project Caroline musings, facts, viewpoints

Spent quite a full today hanging around the Boston waterfront, generally in the shadows, trying to get a sense of just what vision the term Enterprise 2.0 was attempting to conjure. Certainly, there were quotable quotes aplenty from the luminaries to draw upon. But of course, these days anything that even remotely resembles a movement requires such mantras and they're always open to wide interpretation. So by mid morning it hadn't come as a shock that Beelzebub had taken up his usual residence in the particulars.

In some ways and at some levels, I'm a disinterested observer. Even on the best of days, I really can't pretend to get excited about wikified-socially-networked CRMs.  Apparently, this is not as true for hard core devotees still fully immersed in bluish versions of the enterprise software world. These acolytes seem intent to light candles at the altar of subsuming all the latest internet kit and simply deploying it atop or along side everything they've come to know and love over the past few decades. Bring in the new Gods to stand with the old. I wish them well. But I'm supremely skeptical that they'll succeed in boiling this ocean simply by replacing or augmenting the current set of tools with a healthy dose of cool, contemporary, collective collaboration.

Maybe I'm missing something, got it all wrong or just of too suspicious a nature, but I couldn't shake the feeling this particular brand of Nirvana was issuing forth from big traditional softwares houses who were simply salivating over the prospect that finally there was a new way to sell spreadsheets and databases. Regardless, the faction embracing collaboration as the primary benefit of harnessing Web 2.0 concepts seems to ignore some of its primary tenets, namely the notions of rapid innovation, creation, synthesis and ease of connectivity. I heard a lot of talk around simplifying UIs, but nothing about the same aesthetics being applied to hardware and software architecture, deployment, scale, or any of the other characteristics that must be present for such flexibility. Maybe that will be in tomorrow's talks. In the meantime, it strikes me, that public web-based Saas inherits an extremely important property of the web itself, namely Darwinism.  Create a meme that no one cares about and it invariably goes the way of the trilobytes, only far more rapidly. Will enterprise Saas, if not similarly conceived and deployed, retain such properties when subsumed internally? Surely, the ability to rabidly create, cleanse, reshape and replace software is a far more fundamental and compelling a notion than embracing blogs and wikis for managing professional interactions.  Unfortunately, for the technically inclined, it may very well be that in the back room of the enterprise no one can hear you scream.

Yet while aspects of what was presented seemed like simply a new riff on an old theme, judging by the murmurs of the attendees, their view is still a little cloudy. Perhaps this is because while many have a fairly good idea of what they think they want, they have yet to figure out just how to pull the whole deal off. As a result, despite the fact that only a few of the multitude had actually heard of pC, I'm encouraged. Maybe they are sensing what we think we already know.  Truly new paradigms demand truly new platforms.