Lee Bryant articulates a compelling reason for Microsoft and Yahoo to join forces to offer 2.0 services to the enterprise.

The future of enterprise social computing looks like it will involve a combination of internal systems and tools augmented and extended by cloud computing and services. The interaction and adoption models for this will look less like Outlook and more like Flickr or Delicious. Google has bet big on cloud computing, which may eventually form the basis of an appliance business as well for inside the firewall; but Microsoft holds the ring right now with their dominance of internal email (Exchange), the desktop (Windows and Office) and the rise of Sharepoint.

Yahoo currently have some amazing assets that could be deployed to transform Microsoft’s stale, C20th enterprise offering. First, there is Zimbra - a really good communication platform with over 11m mailboxes, according to the company. It provides an excellent Exchange alternative to act as a centre of gravity for a number of enterprise collaboration and interaction modes. Then there is Delicious, Upcoming and some of the other recently acquired services, plus others being developed in-house. Each of these has the potential to make enterprise web apps a lot more useful and interesting than they are right now. Finally, there is the Yahoo interface and design patterns libraries, and the company’s knowledge of how to make useful and compelling Web-native applications that users will enjoy. The problem is, Yahoo have had neither the will nor the culture to turn these assets into valuable enterprise offerings.

Rather than segment the new business into clearly delineated enterprise and consumer divisions, I think there is real scope for throwing the pieces up in the air and recombining them in a more imaginitive way. Enterprise needs the innovation and user experience of consumer-facing web apps, and the consumer side could benefit from the experience of enterprise apps in suporting the basic needs of less motivated and web-aware users.

Only time will tell whether such a coming together of different groups, cultures and tools is possible.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.