Microsoft and IBM, the leaders in business messaging and collaboration software acording to IDC and Gartner, are busy cannabilizing each other's marketshare while disruptive technologies based on Web 2.0 are gaining mindshare.

Plotting this on the technology adoption bell curve adds perspective. IBM and Microsoft are fighing over the pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics. Users of Web 2.0 collaboration tools are being adopted by Techies and Visionaries. But remember, these are two separate curves. As adoption of on-demand computing grows, it will eat into the market for packaged software, leaving Microsoft and IBM to fight over a smaller and smaller pie.

Certainly both companies are experimenting with Web 2.0 concepts (examples: Microsoft's Office Live initiative, IBM's On Demand initiative), and each has shown they possess the agility and resources to reinvent themselves when environmental shifts require it. . Keeping an eye on how they invest their resources should give us a good indication of where we are on the adoption curve for each type of software.

This graphic is from a summary article on Geoffry Moore's Crossing the Chasm

11:08:13 AM    
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I was browsing through Don Hinchcliffe's lists of Web 2.0 software: The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 and More Great Web 2.0 Software, wondering how quickly this information would be out of date given the rising adoption rate of Ajax and all things "Web 2.0" - a term that I admit I'm still a bit fuzzy about.

In 2002 and 2003 I created an online catalog to track the quickly evolving marketplace for COTS collaboration tools, but I can see this type of solution would need a radical overhaul to work with Web 2.0 concepts. To start with, the lessons of collective intelligence tell us that a handful of researchers can't be the only ones populating the database. Rather, a system of open submissions and ratings would be necessary, such as in use at Digg. The second big change would be in the data elements captured - for example it's no longer interesting to filter tools by which "operating system" they run on. For a short while it may be interesting to filter based on which browsers it's been tested in. A huge discriminator would be whether there's an open API available. In addition to capturing "articles" (which could include blogs) on a particular tool, it would be cool to link each tool to a list of mashups that use it. Each of these may be considered a tool itself, so the links between tools will be recursive.

Very preliminary thoughts, to be sure, but the more important question is if such a tools guide was created, how would it be used? Would it be valuable?

8:34:53 AM    
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