Good article. Enterprise will get there, in fact I know that at a global level, they are pushing the innovation level within our firm to a high degree, but the tools they are evaluating don’t provide the depth of functionality that the open source ones do today.

Here’s the challenge — local territories aren’t that interested as they’ve invested money in the road map that our enterprise vendors are providing, but the enterprise toolset isn’t there yet.

Two years from now, all this will dissappear as the Enterprise class of tools provides enough of the functionality in the open-source innovation space today to meet the needs of 80% of the business.

For frustrated innovators like ourselves that want it all today (and know that you could have it if you took some chances and were more aggressive) the challenge is not so much convincing the money holders that they need it, but rather convincing them that it’s worth facing the issues and forging ahead when two years down the track, the nice vendor we pay lots of money to will drop it in our laps — and address many of the things we care about (like security etc.).

Of course when this happens, we’ll be riding the next wave and frustrated that the firm isn’t keeping up!

Folks are stuck in tunnel vision. Discussing with them the pros/cons of email and they are like a deer in headlights. “You mean we can’t do everything in email?”. It is time to break-out of the email lock and start using the right tool for the right purpose.

Fads. A lot of folks seem to be computer-drained. They have had so many buzzwords, new tools, and “big pushes” that they are skeptical. How does one differentiate themselves from this, “no seriously this one works”.

I like that you opened the door to collaboration and people are using it. My trouble now is going from niche use to enterprise use. The average users are a lot harder to convince…

Profile search is going to be huge. Spock just found a load of my profiles that I’d forgotten I had even set up. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google set up a profile search of its own fairly soon. This is one of the missing links in the whole social network or data portability issue

Replacing email with RSS is a great idea but it sort of raises the old problem that everyone needs to have blog in order to generate the feed.

There are so many web 2.0 technologies which have not been taken up by companies yet. It’s dizzying to think of all the benefits to companies of things like networking sites, RSS, blogs, wikis, tagging, search and online storage. Imagine if all you needed to do your work was a web browser; they could give everyone ASUS eee’s and save a fortune in hardware!