InformationWeek: Vendors Vow To Make Web 2.0 More Useful For Businesses

… It’s all about collaboration, but don’t throw out your Microsoft Office or IBM Lotus system just yet, Google, Zimbra, and SocialText argue.

Web 2.0 can be a very successful enterprise tool, but it’s still too immature to completely replace Microsoft Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes, speakers on a Web 2.0 Expo panel said Wednesday.

Asked how they would pitch a CIO or technical officer on their technology, SocialText co-founder and CEO Ross Mayfield, Matthew Glotzbach with Google Enterprise, and Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj all noted that their products add a layer of collaboration and a rich end-user experience that younger employees are demanding.

Employees “are wondering if they are violating corporate e-mail policies all the time when they back up their e-mail to Gmail,” Glotzbach said. “But they do it because they know that they will have a larger space to store their e-mail and they can search for messages easier. This is one of the reasons why we started developing Google Docs.” …

Source: InformationWeek.com

Ofcourse this is just a short article on the promise of Web2.0, but why does it have to be so superficial ?

  • Is Web2.0 just about Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes ?
  • What “layer of collaboration” do the products of these vendors add ?
  • Is Web2.0 just for these companies and do they really expect Microsoft and IBM to sit and watch how the Googles and SocialTexts of this world do their magic ?

According to the article for example , one of the the main drivers for Web2.0 based email is the size of the mailbox and this has led to the development of GoogleDocs. Personally I think this is very lame reason and by no means justification web2.0 based solution by themselves.