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Breaking the Prime Directive
It’s a fascinating time to be involved in the “enterprise” world. The very word still screams Star Trek to me and it’s definitely going places where, at least, it has not gone before and shaking some very non-enterprisey hands. Some of the interesting places the stardrive is kicking towards:
- The established vendors are copying the scrappy startups, not the other way around. It used to be that web based alternatives tried to copy Microsoft Excel. But if you look at the latest version of MS Office, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were actually on a fancified website with tabs and hyperlinks and big honking icons for the most common tasks. I pity the poor startups that are touting a “desktop-like” experience.
- It used to be a virtue that everything was private and locked down by default. Not anymore. Sharing models that make everything public within the organization are all the rage now. The Internet and Google and Facebook feed have all made a very clear case that information wants to be at least findable, if not free and in your face.
- There is growing realization that the tools we spend 8 or more hours of the day with, shouldn’t suck. “Enterprise” software has been (justifiably) criticized for being the worst type of crap to come out of committee-driven design. Thankfully, at least some people are realizing it doesn’t have to be that way. Salesforce.com showed that if you make “enterprise” tools that looked and felt like the sites people liked to use by themselves, businesses would be a lot more successful getting them to work. I’m sure that the next generation of scrappy startups will soon be bringing the engaging experiences from Facebook and YouTube to businesses everywhere, and MS Office will start copying them just as soon as you’ve figured out how to mimic it’s current UI.
At the end of the day, work wants to be fun. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner we can stop making these unseemly distinctions between play and work. And then we can all get laid.
(via Kingsley 2.0)
