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?"
Levy Rivers on 23 Apr 08The truth of the matter is that IBM and MS never need to lead the way. They have large customer bases that will never let that happen. What they can and should do to have investments in smaller more agile firms that can move faster.