Social Glass

In July this year I wrote about Versionate being the next big wiki platform.   I was impressed with how well Versionate played with MS Office.  It seemed effortless to upload a Word document and convert it into a writable wiki page.  It also seemed effortless to export wiki pages into Word.

I was convinced Versionate would take off because A) they recognized that, at least tactically, collaborative platforms like wikis will have to compliment MS Office to gain user acceptance and B) they were looking into a non-SaaS offering where companies can install Versionate behind the firewall to mitigate data security concerns.

I tried to access the Versionate site to see what they were up to, but the connection timed out.  It could be because of my dodgy internet connection here in the hotel in Mazatlan, however.

Has anybody had experience with their product recently?

(interesting now that I’m in the US I’m still posting at 5pm Aussie time)

I’d like to direct your attention to a post by Jevon MacDonald called Enterprise 2.0: Where the f$#@ is my market? where he asks:

Is there such thing as an Enterprise 2.0 market? If so, can you sell in to it? If not: are there startups trying to sell to customers who don’t exist?

and answers by stating:

There is no Enterprise 2.0 market. Enterprise 2.0 budgets do not exist, except where some early adoptors create them, and there is no Enterprise 2.0 sales cycle. There are very few incentive available to experts right now and the discontinuity that has arisen in the concept is a symptom of that.

Jevon goes on to argue that an Enterprise 2.0 Software Market is validated only when there is a problem that software can solve on its own. Otherwise “The people who are making the most money off this term right now are consultants who are helping their clients navigate some of the fluff from the substance”.

I agree with this. As a consultant I’ve always considered Enterprise 2.0 to be more about shifting corporate culture than introducing new technology (although I write a lot about technology in this blog). I remember a quote from Paula Thornton where she wrote “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

When implementing Enterprise 2.0 we need to include strategies to change old school mindsets and get people to ask “why shouldn’t I share this information” instead of “why should I share this information”, for example.

Jevon does go on to say that Enterprise 2.0 software can be successful when focusing on industry verticals where, after a series of successful implementations there, a broader, more horizontal market might appear. Check out his post here.

I safely arrived in Colorado last night.  It’s been 1 year since I’ve been in the US.  I immediately noticed how festive the US is around the holidays. Carols were playing in the LA airport and people said “merry christmas” to me.  This doesn’t really happen in Australia, where if they said it they’d prefer “happy christmas” instead.  It’s also pretty cold in Denver (at least compared with how hot it’s been in Melbourne this past few weeks).  And I had my first Chipotle burrito since last December for dinner tonight. 

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.

Today is my last day with my firm in Australia. I’m heading back to the states after 2.5 years to take a break and then explore some exciting job opportunities. I’ve had a fantastic experience here in Oz and have worked with some amazing people.

I’ve worked on more traditional systems integration projects with large telcos and banks, done some interesting enterprise search implementations, built some cool demo applications, and preached the enterprise 2.0 doctrine to prospects who, in some cases, knew more about the topic than me! I’m very encouraged about the momentum I see in Australia in the social computing space, and I think my firm is well positioned to make a positive impact here.

I wish the best of luck to my colleagues. You can always find me on twitter or here on this blog.

I wanted to send a file to a Gen Y co-worker and asked if he had Skype, GTalk, Yahoo Messenger or MSN. He said:

No man, I don’t use thick clients any more.