There is nothing more an indicator for the clueless people involved in IT than the idea that the unclear and undefined notion of Web 2.0 might save the ailing enterprise IT. No one knows what Web 2.0 is, except maybe that it entails everyone blogging, chatting, wiki-ing, uploading and avataring …
Yes, I am all for empowering the business user but what would be the benefit to have the organization department write process guidelines into Wikis that are RSS’ed to every person who thought it might be interesting for their work? Each user uploading his own discussion on whether this makes sense, and so on and so on. In one book I found the idea that Web 2.0 is really AJAX? It would rather be RIA.
Do Mash-Ups belong to the Web 2.0 idea? You, see no one knows. I already read about Web 3.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and obviously SOA 2.0. What nonsense …
But there are other ideas. I followed a presentation by IBM about how a bank might create a virtual 3D world where avatars of customers would visit virtual bank branches to be serviced. Would it not be a lot more sensible to finally deliver a version of WebSphere that would make it easy for a bank to setup and run an online banking application without years of Java coding?
Max Pucher