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August 16 Web 2.0 - A Year OnI first wrote about Web 2.0 on this blog almost exactly a year ago with this post. Looking back, I talked about Web 2.0 as a kind of threat, "competition" for the services IT Services provide, and suggested IT Services risked becoming irrelevant if the services did not match or better these sort of services. In my opinion, the relevancy would come by realising what we can work with and what battles weren't worth fighting. Reading some blogs and news items of the time, I think that was a pretty accurate snapshot of where we as a profession were a year ago. How have things changed?
One strange thing is that its almost as interesting to talk about what HASN'T happened, as what has. To be honest, when I was giving my theory that Web 2.0 "equates to one of the biggest changes in the way services are delivered" since the Web itself, I expected a whole lot more to have happened in the past year than it has. I did expect Web 2.0 to take off in a big way in the past year; I expected to see by now what I would call the "Web 2.0 software stack" - in that users will log into any machine and then go off to Windows Live or Google and from there, their entire software experience is based around that web service: email, IM, VOIP, Documents, Presentations, Storage, etc. Why hasn't things happened quite to this extent?
Firstly, the technology wasn't and, dare I suggest, isn't mature enough. Or powerful enough. If you analyse, for example, Google Docs (Writely), it is now barely better functionality-wise than Wordpad or the equivalent application on other platforms. There is no doubt that the likes of Google are currently developing these apps to make them better but I wonder just how powerful they could make an application running in a web browser, across the Internet. To be honest, I think you can only go so far before edging at the security and performance boundaries. There is no doubt to me that these boundaries will offer less features, be less responsive and end up giving less productivity in these applications than in a traditional desktop application.
One area that grown over the past year is the concept of Enterprise 2.0. The whole area of "Enterprise 2.0" has really matured in the past year from being an idea championed by the likes of Andrew McAfee (who, well, coined the term) and Dion Hinchcliffe to having real possibilities. There are real steps being taken forward. However, if you search Google for "Enterprise 2.0", you will see that there are still a lot of baby-steps occurring, and a lot of people still figuring out where this area needs to go. Its important to note though that Enterprise 2.0 is not really a revolution - it is more an organic development of understanding how Web 2.0 can fit into the very rigid structures of an enterprise environment and is being crafted into the latest take on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One offshoot of this is that Enterprise 2.0 tends to be less burdened with the more extreme and ridiculous ideologies that Web 2.0 has.
For myself, a complete pragmatist when it comes to IT and technology, this is important. I look back over my posts of the past year and see myself go through a similar maturing from what could be defined as Web 2.0 thinking to Enterprise 2.0 thinking: I like a lot of the ideas of Web 2.0, but many of the practicalities don't fit an organisation/enterprise environment, therefore there needs to be a different take. When I blogged about "IT Services 2.0", it was very much angled towards this idea of Enterprise 2.0, more than Web 2.0.
So, for the year ahead? Over the next year I expect, actually, very little. By the middle of 2008, you can expect to see a lot more Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 applications get targeted towards the enterprise but the current problem is that everyone lacks a clear leading platform to work against. And that is the area that will form up in the next year (and it wont be Facebook!). But that's for another post. TrackbacksWeblogs that reference this entry
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