Web 2.0 has corporate America spinning
June 5, 2006 from BusinessWeek - "Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords, and there's none more popular today than Web 2.0. Unless you're a diehard techie, though, good luck figuring out what it means. Web 2.0 technologies bear strange names like wikis, blogs, RSS, AJAX, and mashups. And the startups hawking them -- Renkoo, Gahbunga, Ning, Squidoo -- sound like Star Wars characters George Lucas left on the cutting-room floor.
But behind the peculiarities, Web 2.0 portends a real sea change on the Internet. If there's one thing they have in common, it's what they're not. Web 2.0 sites are not online places to visit so much as services to get something done -- usually with other people. From Yahoo!'s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr and the group-edited online reference source Wikipedia to the teen hangout MySpace, and even search giant Google, they all virtually demand active participation and social interaction. If these Web 2.0 folks weren't so geeky, they might call it the Live Web.
And though these Web 2.0 services have succeeded in luring millions of consumers to their shores, they haven't had much to offer the vast world of business. Until now. Slowly but surely they're scaling corporate walls. "All these things that are thought to be consumer services are coming into the enterprise," says Ray Lane, former Oracle president and now a general partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
For all its appeal to the young and the wired, Web 2.0 may end up making its greatest impact in business. And that could usher in more changes in corporations, already in the throes of such tech-driven transformations as globalization and outsourcing. Indeed, what some are calling Enterprise 2.0 could flatten a raft of organizational boundaries -- between managers and employees and between the company and its partners and customers. Says Don Tapscott, CEO of the Toronto tech think tank New Paradigm and co-author of The Naked Corporation: "It's the biggest change in the organization of the corporation in a century."
All that's going to require more than slick technology. Executives, long used to ruling from the top of the corporate hierarchy, will have to learn a new skill: humility. "Companies that are extremely hierarchical have trouble adapting," says Tim O'Reilly, CEO of tech book publisher O'Reilly Media, which runs the annual Web 2.0 Conference "They'll be outperformed by companies that don't work that way." Ultimately, taking full advantage of Web 2.0 may require -- get ready -- Management 2.0."
180 View - Sounds like hype to us. The article fails to explain Web 2.0. It seems like it's all about using the internet more effectively than before. Has anything changed or is it just creative people taking advantage of what already exists. We think it's both. As far as what's changed, two technologies come to mind - one is web services, which has been around for years, but has not really taken off yet. The other is Ajax. Web services, amongst other uses, will allow sharing of data (such as purchase orders) across any system. And Ajax is allowing internet applications to have as much functionality as our favourite PC applications.
June 5, 2006 from BusinessWeek - "Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords, and there's none more popular today than Web 2.0. Unless you're a diehard techie, though, good luck figuring out what it means. Web 2.0 technologies bear strange names like wikis, blogs, RSS, AJAX, and mashups. And the startups hawking them -- Renkoo, Gahbunga, Ning, Squidoo -- sound like Star Wars characters George Lucas left on the cutting-room floor.
But behind the peculiarities, Web 2.0 portends a real sea change on the Internet. If there's one thing they have in common, it's what they're not. Web 2.0 sites are not online places to visit so much as services to get something done -- usually with other people. From Yahoo!'s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr and the group-edited online reference source Wikipedia to the teen hangout MySpace, and even search giant Google, they all virtually demand active participation and social interaction. If these Web 2.0 folks weren't so geeky, they might call it the Live Web.
And though these Web 2.0 services have succeeded in luring millions of consumers to their shores, they haven't had much to offer the vast world of business. Until now. Slowly but surely they're scaling corporate walls. "All these things that are thought to be consumer services are coming into the enterprise," says Ray Lane, former Oracle president and now a general partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
For all its appeal to the young and the wired, Web 2.0 may end up making its greatest impact in business. And that could usher in more changes in corporations, already in the throes of such tech-driven transformations as globalization and outsourcing. Indeed, what some are calling Enterprise 2.0 could flatten a raft of organizational boundaries -- between managers and employees and between the company and its partners and customers. Says Don Tapscott, CEO of the Toronto tech think tank New Paradigm and co-author of The Naked Corporation: "It's the biggest change in the organization of the corporation in a century."
All that's going to require more than slick technology. Executives, long used to ruling from the top of the corporate hierarchy, will have to learn a new skill: humility. "Companies that are extremely hierarchical have trouble adapting," says Tim O'Reilly, CEO of tech book publisher O'Reilly Media, which runs the annual Web 2.0 Conference "They'll be outperformed by companies that don't work that way." Ultimately, taking full advantage of Web 2.0 may require -- get ready -- Management 2.0."
180 View - Sounds like hype to us. The article fails to explain Web 2.0. It seems like it's all about using the internet more effectively than before. Has anything changed or is it just creative people taking advantage of what already exists. We think it's both. As far as what's changed, two technologies come to mind - one is web services, which has been around for years, but has not really taken off yet. The other is Ajax. Web services, amongst other uses, will allow sharing of data (such as purchase orders) across any system. And Ajax is allowing internet applications to have as much functionality as our favourite PC applications.
posted by 180 Systems at 9:29 PM 
1 Comments:
You got this one wrong. Web2.0 represents a signficant shift in how information, data, and ultimately, the corporation will be managed. It represents democratization of knowledge which will have to be supported in corporate systems.
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