[via Rajesh Jain]
- Web 2.0 is people, collaboration, creating together.
- Business Model change is more important than technology change.
- The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.
- Give up control, gain value.
- Start small, grow bottom up.
- The question is not what new programs can do for us, but now that we’re enabled, what do we do together, better.
I thought I could pick out two or three of the most important points from this list, but each one seems as important as the other. Each is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for succeeding in leveraging the power of the Internet to do business. If pressed to pick the most important one, it would have to be
- The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.
I wrote about this a long time back (Feb 2005), in “ Hula and the future of software“. I hadn’t even heard of the term Web 2.0 back then, but the paradigm was clear. I was talking about Novell’s new business model, after the acquisition of Ximian and SUSE. The challenge, as I said back then, was to gain acceptance from the wide user community Out There, but the application itself must be usable by organizations too. Software applications can no longer be classified into verticals like B2B, B2C, C2C (or P2P). The Internet just throws these paradigms out the window. To quote from my year-old article,
“…the company needs to build great, industry-strength products that large corporates will use, and will be willing to pay for support. But on the other, these products also need to be “cool” enough, “sexy” enough, for the average nerd to download, try out, and muck about with.”