As one anxious CEO told his
staff at a meeting last Thursday: “The future of the way people consume
information, the way people socialise and connect, is going to change a lot
more in the next ten years even than in the last ten. How you find
information, how you consume it, how you share it and connect with your
friends... dramatic changes.”

That agitated CEO, by the way, was Steve Ballmer, of Microsoft, which to date
has thrown a $10 billion investment at its internet operations without
turning a profit. True, his firm's own record on monopolistic abuse of power
is pretty colourful, and its cash pile of an estimated $40 billion hardly
makes it a minnow.

As usual, IBM is absolutely right in its observations, but eons late to the dance in Internet 2.0 terms. At this point, IBM is telling us that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way around.

And IBM will never catch up. I've said this before. All IBM will ever do is bolt collaboration tools onto their preexisting application suites--a clunky approach for which absolutely no one will have patience.

What surprises me about Swisher and Perez is that they seem to buy into the idea that enterprise users will wait for the grumpy IT departments. Swisher writes:

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount and startups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM and Microsoft.

Puleease! Big copycats like IBM and Microsoft have been pouring out the same old blather about security and scaling while line-of-business chiefs are turning to their young hires and saying, "hey, how much is of those open source wiki things going to run me, and how fast can we set it up?"