ACM Queue has an interview with Ray Ozzie this month where he tackles some of the issues social networking and Web 2.0 technologies face in terms of mass adoption, particularly within the enterprise. This is a topic that's come up other places recently, including Jeff Nolan's candid discussions about social communication efforts at SAP.
Some of the key points from the interview [I'm paraphrasing here, to see the excellent article in its entirety, click HERE]:
- Inter-departmental communication is now something we take for granted, but was a revolutionary concept back in the 80s when Ozzie was at Lotus
- Organizations can no longer presume to understand or have control over other companies' IT infrastructure [the conventional enterprise/data center model is no longer the default]
- Email is stressed to the limits of its utility as the standard for collaborative communications
- Small businesses and individuals are accruing the benefits of new collaborative technologies [i.e., wikis, blogs, podcasts] much faster than larger enterprises
- Enterprises place value on compartmentalization and securitization of data whereas the public internet is about accessibility and expanded reach
- The "wisdom of crowds" approach is more intellectually intriguing than something proven in practice on the public internet at this juncture
- Making microchunked [to borrow from Michael Parekh] data and code available to the public has a powerful cumulative effect that extends beyond the current boundaries of collaborative software
- RSS is the Unix pipe of the Internet [note: odd he didn't expand that to include SSE]
- All Ray wants for Xmas is ubiquitous broadband and wireless connectivity for consumers and a reversal of the compliance and bureaucracy-laden IT bottlenecks that plague bigger companies
As a Microsoft shareholder, I continue to applaud Ozzie's return to the fold. He's at his best evangelizing collaborative technologies, and it's stimulating to think he's fighting that fight within one of the most powerful [and influential...for better or worse] technology shops in the world.
Note: I and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over maintained a long equity position in MSFT at the time of this writing.
ozzie microsoft MSFT software collaboration blogs wiki socialnetworking woodrow
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