I was asked the other day how I thought social networking would impact the enterprise.
I came up with the example of the old Indian fable of the blind men and the elephant. Even though they were blind, if they could easily talk to one another, they would have been to figure out what was going on.
Just like any organization.
The NYT article on MS vs. Google contains 2 seemingly unrelated parts that illustrate the stark difference between MS and Google.
Mr. Raikes (from Microsoft) notes that Microsoft has spent years and billions of dollars in product development and customer research, studying in minute detail how individual workers and companies use software.
Later in the article, the authors relate the story of how some cellphone software a Googler developed was released just 6 weeks after the idea was born. No formal product reviews or formal approval processes.
Different worlds.
UPDATE. A great follow-up on this: Microsoft in Denial: Google threat is classic disruption
There are other related posts like this by Guy Creese. This post displays the fairly common lack of understanding that Google Apps is NOT simply a MS Office replacement - it is much more disruptive than that. And I think Guy’s comment that the adoption of cloud computing will follow the same curve as electricity is just silly, as if the pace of change hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Yes, it may take a while for companies in the USA that already have huge infrastructures in place to make the change - but the real growth will be in places like China and India, where there are a lot fewer legacy data centers and related bureaucracy to deal with, and where adopting cloud computing out the gate is a no-brainer.
