Jargon Watch X-Internet - The executable internet according to Forrester Research CEO George Colony. Why call a hyped-up trend by its existing name when you can call it something different?
Roughly speaking X-Internet is Web 2.0; George is particularly interested in the way that it can be applied to enterprise applications and hypothesises in his think piece My view: the Google future that AJAX and Google services will herald an age of enterprise applications funded by advertising.
The what it means section had some interesting takeouts:
- Large corporations should take advantage of web 2.0 technologies including: Google Desktop Search, Google Toolbar, and Google Maps to help drive productivity
- IT staff will learn to incorporate web 2.0 services and APIs into the corporate web. Bottom line upgrade your JavaScript skills to become an AJAX maven - VB programming skills and MSDN won't cut it
- Microsoft will lose roughly half its profit margins as it tries to compete with advertising-funded software (web 2.0) from 25 per cent net to 13 per cent net margins
- George writes off Yahoo!, eBay, AOL and Amazon as being stuck with old web 1.0 experiences
- Enterprise software vendors will have to duke it out with AJAX enhanced web-based service providers like Salesforce.com over the next five years
George's points though interesting make a number of assumptions that may not be correct: Google is unchallengable
- There was no mention of the contribution by the open source community
- The article did not reconcile how the lower barriers to entry for start-ups afforded by web 2.0 would cope with a corporate enterprise environment that looks for eight-year support contracts and purchasing decisions that would take a year
- He assumed that despite the low barriers to entry, other Internet players would not adopt web 2.0 technologies
- There was no consideration of how web 2.0 would affect security and the complexity of some of the issues involved. Remember online marketplaces and how internet exchanges were going to affect the world - many of them were abandoned or had their goals severely trimmed in order to meet a revised definition of success
