Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….

Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing and Spider in equal proportions. I scan the incoming alerts for mail on my main machine and only click into the inbox now and then. Over the weekend or on the road, unless I’m waiting for a reply from a friend or an editor, I ignore my email for a lot of the day. Yes, I get sucked into just getting through my inbox when I should be getting on with work a little too often, but I don’t feel actually addicted.

I do feel that far too many things that ought to have a proper workflow slosh over into email; you could save a lot of time by using SharePoint to store documents that you want people to review or using a self-service portal to book travel or update your detail with HR rather than putting unstructured info in an email that someone else has to transfer into an application later anyway. Automate the bits of the approvals process that currently rely on someone pulling out their BlackBerry on the train to give a routine ‘yes’ and you might be surprised what speeds up in your company.

Just as bad are the cc wars, where cc-ing people is a political chess move; I save it for a very, very few strategic emails myself, but then I don’t work in a department any more.

I agree with Jeremy Burton, the CEO of Serena about a lot of things like business mashups being the future of many line of business applications; they’re the Excel macros of Web 2.0. But, as I was reminded when I was writing a case study on him for an up-coming feature, he’s also the guy who invented no-email Friday when he was running Veritas. It’s good to pace yourself – I like quoting Charmaine Eggbury of RIM, who told me that “the most important button on any BlackBerry is the off button”. If you’re actually addicted and it’s interfering with other work tasks or your personal life, then maybe an enforced break will make you reconsider. I don’t agree that forcing people not to send and read email is realistic in today’s business world. An executive who finds they can get away without email probably has someone else picking up the slack, and last time I saw Jeremy he certainly had his BlackBerry to hand (although connecting to Gmail rather than Exchange as an experiment).

Does email suck up more time than I’d really like? Definitely. Could I give email up for a week and still have any work coming in? Probably not. What I really want it more tools like SNARF and Xobni that let me deal with the key messages without spending time wading through messages that can be filed unread in case I ever need the information in them.

My name’s Mary and I have 1,289 unread messages in my inbox.

It’s still about adding value according to HP’s software and services VP Tom Hogan. He was presenting to a group of 30 IT executives in London the other day and he thought he’d respect the mood of the moment. “I was very intentionally talking about cost reduction and efficiency because of all the uncertainty in the world economy. I wanted to pound the point on how IT can help save money,” he told us. But he’d read the mood wrong for the UK.

“It was interesting how many people said ‘Great, but we really don’t care about that. What we care about is how can we add more value in our line of business, because senior executives are still willing to spend more if they get the value from IT.’ It makes a point in this time of uncertainty. Ten years ago when the world was so unstable, IT would have been in shutdown. Now IT is so key that they’re still thinking about what to do next.”

Will what they do next include buying HP software? Take Mercury and Opsware and the ‘business technology optimisation’ tools that HP has built with them. They’re not tools for doing business with IT; they’re tools for turning IT into a business, for giving the IT department KPIs and scorecards they can track the way other business units do. Investing in IT that does IT might not be top of the shopping list tactically, but a real CIO does strategy these days.

Salesforce recently commissioned a survey of UK CIOs at small companies; Ian Parkes who conducted the research calls CIOs an endangered species. “They’re going to be rebranded as the chief operating officer or even removed. They’ve got to show value add, but they are not able to articulate it from the point view of looking for investment. Too often they do not have sufficient power to do what you would imagine a CIO would do, they are not board members and they don’t have that level of power or credibility within the organization.”

If you want to spend money on IT at the moment, you’re going to have to be able to explain the value and explain it in business terms.

-Mary

It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.

The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.

The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really well, you’re only spending 35% keeping the lights on and if you’re supremely ambitious you want to get that down to 20%; maybe that’s the 7-10% of companies that Tom Hogan guestimates have already got their IT automated.

After all, why should the majority of your budget go on doing the same thing over and over again so that the business can stay where it was last month? You should have the routine automated; it will stop you losing staff to sheer and utter boredom too. But once you plug everything in enough to automate it and track it  - not just in terms of transaction throughput or whether the next laptop you buy will trigger a discount if you buy it from vendor H instead of vendor I but who has a problem, who’s about to have a problem, who’s working on it right now and who has already spent how long fixing what on what annual salary -  you can also start to put a value on it.

The next time you ask for a new server, you can show how much it’s costing to chug along on the old one - and what difference you’ve made with the last budget you were allocated. You can show which SLAs the IT team has met and what that means in cold hard cash. When you get asked to do too much with too little, instead of sucking your teeth like a builder you can say exactly what it will cost to do properly and what they can get for the money they want to spend. You can even tell the business what projects are a bad idea before you plug in a single server.

It’s not rocket science; a good project has high value to the business, a small cost to implement and a low budget requirement. The IT department spends the whole year putting in systems that let the rest of the business evaluate business ideas and existing services in those terms; isn’t it about time you had that for yourself too?
-Simon

BT shareholders should stop worrying about the cost of fibre. Everyone wants fast broadband and the current plans aren’t so expensive that they’ll take years to pay off.

I noticed the other day that the market didn’t take well to the news that BT is really moving forward on plans to roll out fibre across to the UK to drag broadband speeds into the 21st century (think 8Mbps DSL is fast? - check out Korea, or Paris where they’re laying 30Mbps fibre). Cable coverage in the UK is a joke (NTL bought the cheapest demographic data it could find for high population density and ended up cabling multiple occupancy council estates where it couldn’t get licenses to offer a service and running out of money before it got round all the consumers and small businesses that actually wanted cable modems).

Now the analysts at Point Topic have done some interesting sums. BT’s proposal to cover 40% of the homes in the UK for £1.5bn works out at £150 per household - a lot less than the £800 each in previous calculations for doing all 25 million households. And making that pay dividends to all those worried shareholders will only take about £3 per household, according to Point Topic, because BT will be making savings on operating costs. Fibre means new services to sell; we might finally be able to get seamless roaming between landline calls, mobile calls and VOIP - it’s all IP underneath, after all. Some of the bandwidth will doubtless get eaten up by pay-for IP TV services.

And the regulator will need to keep an eye on who you can buy fibre from or we’ll be back to a monopoly faster than you can tell Sid pirated content isn’t the only reason anyone wants a fast connection (when did you last use an MSDN CD instead of downloading the ISO?). The industry has been asking OFCOM to promise it will be able to make money out of fibre as if it was something new and different. There may more trenches to dig in remote areas - although you can blow fibre down an existing conduit with compressed air - and you have to get the termination right, but it’s not rocket science. As Tim Johnson at Point Topic puts it, “by and large BT’s shareholders should be able to finance the investment, carry the risk and reap a good profit in return.”

Bandwidth; it’s a business, not a right, but it should be good business all round.
-Mary
 

A comment from Wyse popped into my inbox the other day, criticising the government for using desktop PCs instead of thin clients which are “inherently more energy efficient” (surprise surprise).

David Angwin, director of marketing for EMEA, claimed that “thin client computers give users exactly the same applications and performance as a PC and run on as little a tenth of the electricity.” Certainly, Wyse is one of the few thin client manufacturers who can claim to support a wide range of applications; I know one financial company who had to replace the first batch of thin clients they tried with Wyse kit almost within the week because the others couldn’t cope with video clips. But is that power figure the whole story?

Earlier in the year I was talking to Barry Goodall at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He’s spent a lot of time and effort greening the council’s IT and although he’s a big fan of server virtualisation, he has a much less positive view of the green credentials of thin clients after he disproved the figures in a Frauenhofer Institute report on green computing. “The report said we could save million of pounds by using thin clients, so we were quite interested in this! We looked at some of the details and things leapt out at us; in particular the power consumption of PCs was markedly higher than ours - we use Dell desktops.”

He was checking his Dells anyway, because Dell was claiming upgrading to model 745s would save as much energy as changing from CRT to LCD screens. “We have an electricity monitoring gadget from Maplin which I highly recommend: don’t trust anything the manufacturers tell you! It’s very easy and you need to measure it yourself.” His measurements showed the model 745s used the same 60 Watts of power as the Dell kit he already had; Dell’s 45 Watt figure assumed energy management features that weren’t turned on by default. “Energy saving features in the BIOS count for nothing unless you enable hibernation in Windows!”

But 60 Watts or 45, it was still a far cry from the 120 Watts that Frauenhofer was assuming for a desktop PC. That’s what you’d expect from a top-end home machine with a high-power graphics card for gaming; business desktops are rather more frugal.

That wasn’t the only place he felt the sums didn’t add up. “Although the report said in the text that they had accounted for PCs being turned on maybe ten hours a day, terminal servers are typically running 24/7. If you tot up the number of hours people work out of the year, even though it feels like you work all the hours God sends, it’s actually about 2,200 and the figures in their tables hadn’t taken that into account. When we plugged in the correct figures they supported the opposite arguments; with the number of clients per server they assumed, it was more expensive in terms of CO2 than a typical fat client environment. Thin client can be more energy efficient but you need to be clever and turn some servers off when demand is low; you have to be monitoring the workload so you can turn some servers off overnight and come the morning, start turning them back on again - though you’re running a little bit of a risk that maybe one or two servers won’t start up and you’ll struggle a little.”

When I talked to Jon Stewart at Cisco about security trends recently, he slipped in a few network arguments (as you’d expect from a network company). “I have a feeling [that] what you’re going to end up seeing is very thin, light application suites that are endpoint based and a very rich experience using massive network build out. It’s already started to happen; definitely BT has gone down this route. You’re basically saying the end point is going to matter less at a computational level. The display and the keyboard and the system that you interact with, is the most valuable. Think about Lufthansa going to wireless on their planes, they’re trying to solve the inability to do work when you’re mobile. Everything about handset mobility, you’re trying to solve work when you’re mobile. But each time it happens, less and less computational necessity exists on the device - you’re just getting the service on the device.”

But do we care less and less about devices? Again, you’d expect Steve Ballmer to favour the PC, but he told his audience at the Partner Conference that actually, all the devices that are getting attention are fat (we just need to make them easy too). “It’s ironic, people talk a lot about whether people want thin clients. And I don’t deny people want reduced cost, and complexity of management. I think we’re all hearing that from our customers. But people don’t want to really give up the richness and capabilities of a rich client. We even see that in phones. What’s going on in phones today? Phones are actually getting richer. That’s what Windows Mobile is, that’s what the iPhone is, that’s what Symbian is, that’s what Android is: all of these things are getting richer, and Windows PCs will be the richest, most capable device that most people ever own.”

Chatting with Peter Biddle, ex of Microsoft and now at UK enterprise social networking startup Trampoline, he suggested that as usual, what matters is both the device and the network. “Think about it; when did you last do any useful work without being online?”
-Mary

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

Some people are losing access to IM as well, which is stupidly counter-productive because it’s a fantastic work tool. Blocking IM is like not providing a telephone. I’m less certain about work use of social networks and blogs, because although they have some work benefits like networking, it’s often the employee rather than the company that gets the benefits - I might be networking to find a contact for my current project but if I move on, that contact isn’t much use to my company. And while I could see your status on Facebook, I could see it on IM as well, without the potential distractions. And let’s face it, Facebook is 99% distraction…

The Telegraph reported last year that 70% of UK companies agree with me and are blocking sites like Facebook. But I - and they - might well be wrong. Dell announced today that it’s giving all employees access to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and other social sites because productivity issues pale into insignificance besides being out of touch with your customers. Dell opened up to Facebook weeks ago so staff could join in a competition it was running, but given how hard Dell is trying to look like a company that listens to customers, it’s useful for employees to be able to defend the company, solve user problems or just hear what its customers are saying to their friends. Passionate Dell employees are to feel more appreciated than the British Airways employees who defend the company in Facebook groups on their own time.

Marc Smith at Microsoft Research has spent years tracking online interactions - not to accuse people of wasting time, but to understand online social dynamics. He thinks Dell has the right idea because it’s finding out more about itself and “self awareness is such a powerful tool for businesses.” You could spend a lot of money on surveys, focus groups, BI tools and company meetings to find out what customers think of you and communicate that around the company. Or you could let everyone rub shoulders with customers and find out first hand.

If you want your employees keeping your users happy online, on top of not blocking their access, Smith suggests thinking of ways to give them credit for the time they put in helping them. Microsoft in Brazil was worried when all the discussion on a once-popular area of the official site went away; it turned out it had moved to a newsgroup that was tracked by Smith’s Netscan tool, because people liked being able to see when they contributed the most answers. If employees want access to Facebook, turn that into a business benefit by tracking who helps the most customers. Some supervision is going to be a good thing, along with a policy on what people can and can’t say; you can go into detail, or you can stick with something simple like the Microsoft blogging policy, which states that you have to be smart to work at Microsoft so don’t do anything stupid online.

But even if people are reading Facebook and LiveJournal and other sites for fun rather than work, I’m pretty sure management rather than censorship is the solution. This is nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with management and motivation. If you trust your users to have a phone on their desk and not spend the whole day talking to friends, can’t you trust them not to waste the day chatting in IM pr throwing food on Facebook?

People who lose a day to reading non-work Web pages of any kind - whether it’s Facebook or the BBC News or eBay or cat macros or anything else - are goofing off and you should be able to tell that through your normal management procedures. If you can’t tell whether someone is doing a good job by what they deliver, counting up the time they spend not working isn’t the answer, but monitoring is better than saying to your employees that you don’t trust them to behave professionally. Now that the work-life boundaries are not so much blurred as completely muddied, someone who spends an hour after lunch staying in touch with friends probably spends an hour after dinner catching up on work too.

I remember the week I discovered Usenet (my supervisor introduced me to it the first time we discussed my MSc thesis). I don’t remember much else I did that week; it was a huge distraction and I plunged straight in for hours on end. And at the end of the week I looked at how much time I’d wasted and thought ‘I’d better not spend too much time on this, I have work to do’.

Plus, once you’ve pushed them onto a mobile device that uses 3G rather than your Wi-Fi then you’ve lost all chance of tracking what they’re up to - and maybe they’re no longer as passionate about defending your company online either.
-Mary

You have no privacy, Larry Ellison said a few years ago; get over it. Is that because of governments and security agencies keeping track of you - or because of how much personal information you hand out yourself? If you want to break into someone’s bank account, most of the ’secret questions’ used for security are probably answered on their Facebook account. And how about the information you give away when you sign up for a special offer or fill in a survey?

If you don’t remember to go tick the box to say it can’t go to third parties, some marketing companies will happily pass along anything they know about your religious beliefs  (one in ten), ethnic background (one in seven) and sexual orientation (one in fourteen). And your mobile phone number and marital status… And if you don’t care who knows that, are you happy that one in four pass along your credit card details? Only 3% would hand over your national ID number if they had it - and they would keep secret your job performance, your biometrics - and possibly in light of the Facebook Beacon debacle, what movies you’ve rented.

These figures come from a survey done for StrongMail, an email delivery company, and show the difference you’d expect between data protection professionals believing customers should have more privacy than marketing professionals. But the real answer is if you don’t want something passed on, don’t tell anyone in the first place - because StrongMail’s figures also suggest two thirds of all companies have lost customer data somewhere along the line.

And make sure anything you’re passing on is something you’re supposed to know; according to Cyber-Ark’s survey a third of people who work in IT are happy to use the passwords they have access to for snooping on salary details, M & A plans, people’s personal emails and minutes of board meetings. And the passwords that protect anything that’s supposed to be secure? you know you don’t change them when someone in IT leaves. A third of admin passwords get changed once a quarter but nearly one in ten never get changed at all. If someone leaves in a bad mood, they can come back and check out personal customer details and company secrets any time they feel like remoting in.

If you want privacy for your own details or your company, it’s time to do something about it.
-Mary

The new BlackBerry Bold sounds like a hot new smartphone: half VGA resolution, 600MHz processor, 1GB of internal memory, 2 megapixel camera, H264 video in hardware, GPS and Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE, HTML email and a better Web browser ready for Web 2.0. Think YouTube, hi-res movie trailers, photo blogging, Facebook updates, ringtones, online shopping…

Oh, and think SAP CRM, encrypted email, secure Bluetooth for authenticating with a smartcard and all the other enterprise tools you expect from a BlackBerry. The Bold has a QWERTY keyboard and a screen you might point at but can’t touch (wait about six months for that). This isn’t a sleek little Pearl designed for consumers and the pockets in tight jeans; this a full-size BlackBerry aimed at the business. But it has all the consumer features – Bluetooth, 2 mpixel camera, multimedia player and a microSD slot – the absence of which was once the reason business picked BlackBerry in the first place.

RIM isn’t only relying on the security options in BlackBerry Enterprise Server to lock those features down to keep the IT department happy to ensure that BlackBerry stays popular in business. It’s deliberately putting consumer features into business devices to make sure that business users like them enough to keep using them. And businesses might want consumer features in more devices - to encourage employees to buy their own BlackBerrys and bring them to work. If your users are going to bring in a smartphone, RIM could argue, wouldn’t you rather it was one you can control and secure?

If you’re bemoaning the consumerisation of IT because you have to deal with users bringing in social networking applications – the way they brought in IM, Wi-Fi and PDAs – try thinking the RIM way. The consumerisation of IT isn’t going to stop any time soon. Your users have a faster network connection and more advanced communication options at home than they do at work; they probably find it easier to share photos with their extended family than to share planning documents with partners. You can complain about them not thinking about the security implications or not being able to judge which systems are good enough to work in a business setting, but you can’t stop them trying new tools and bringing them to work in an attempt to make their jobs easier.

And if you’re one of the IT professionals who Computer Associates says feels ‘disenfranchised’ because business decision makers don’t think about the IT impact of their business decisions, you definitely need to try thinking the RIM way. IT adds value to the business – but don’t expect the business people to know that (especially if you just told them not to use their favourite social network to talk to their peers in other companies). And expecting them to worry about impact on IT? That’s kind of forgetting who pays the bills and why a business puts in IT in the first place. To get the business to see IT as a value rather than a cost, a source of innovation rather than administration, try figuring out how you can leverage the technologies business users are trying out and give them what they want. And if you just don’t have the budget or the visibility to do that easily, remember that giving them that support will buy you a lot more consideration than burying your head in the sand.  

Those technology-aware business users aren’t going to make your job easier on purpose and they’re not going to use the tools they bring in purely for business purposes, because there aren’t neat dividing lines between work and play any more. Instead of trying to lock down everything, look for how you can partition personal and business use – something RM makes easier than a lot of other vendors.

So Microsoft walked away from its bid for Yahoo! after raising its offer to $33 a share.

I’m not really surprised at this result. As much as he’s like to think so Yahoo! isn’t worth the $37 a share that Jerry Yang was holding out for, and I really don’t think Microsoft wanted to go hostile considering the damage it would have done to the Yahoo! engineering teams it wanted. Yahoo!’s stated strategy would do much to destroy the company that Microsoft wanted, and that wouldn’t have been what anyone wanted. If the price had risen to more than $33 a share, and Steve Ballmer would have been risking an awful lot of additional gearing that would have ended up diluting Microsoft’s control of its own destiny.

So what’s next? One option is to for Microsoft to take the same approach it did with Borland in the 90s, when it failed to purchase the developer tools company. Instead Microsoft just started to hire the talent it wanted, bringing on board the skills it needed to give it a more mature development platform. If that’s the case here, then recruiters in the Bay Area can probably look for a bumper year as Microsoft starts to cherry pick the talent it wants from Yahoo!’s engineering teams. That’ll be considerably cheaper for Microsoft, though any results will take time to filter through its product pipeline. It took nearly 10 years for .NET to get to where it is today. There’s one problem though, in that Google’s checque book may be a little bigger than Microsoft’s - and unless Microsoft substantially increases the size of its Silicon Valley campus it’s going to be hard to entice developers to move from the balmy South Bay to the damp of the Pacific NorthWet.

The other option is, I think, going to depend on how the Microsoft and Yahoo! stock prices behave over the next quarter or two. The first few days of trading should see a steep drop in Yahoo!’s price, and an equivalent (but not so dramatic) rise in Microsoft. The spectre of a hefty gearing has depressed Microsoft’s stock, and the prospect of a payday has pushed Yahoo!’s up. If Yahoo! continues to trend down, its board is going to come under considerable pressure from institutional shareholders as to why it didn’t take the $33 offer. Yahoo! will end having to approach various suitors, but there won’t be a white knight until Microsoft comes in with a bid at around $28 (or possibly even lower) a share, which the Yahoo! board will be forced to accept.

That certainly seems to be what the market is expecting. Looking at the stock prices a day or so after Microsoft’s Microsoft’s share price rose, but not hugely, and Yahoo!’s hasn’t fallen all the way back to its pre-bid lows. Key shareholders are making a lot of noise about Yahoo!’s boards performance, and it looks as though Jerry Yang is going to be in for a rough ride. Yahoo! is going to have to pull out all the stops to get its new Yahoo! Open strategy announced at the Web 2.0 Expo up and running, and board-room turmoil will be an unnecessary distraction.

It’s still too soon to call it. The story’s not over by a long way - and the dealer’s just started to put down the cards for the next round. There’s a lot of money on the table somewhere for someone, and whatever happens over the next few months Microsoft gets the people and skills it wants for less than it was originally planning to pay, though the second option adds a few additional properties and the trauma of a merger…

–Simon 

Well, Tim O’Reilly has an idea, because he came up with the term. And the new O’Reilly Web 2.0 consulting practice ought to know. In fact one of the reasons the company set up the consultancy arm is to get everyone to agree on a definition, because we can’t have a good conversation about the  benefits Web 2.0 can bring business if we mean something different.

Some people think of Web 2.0 as just about social networks or about sharing user-generated content. By other definitions, anything built with Ajax is Web 2.0, but that would make Outlook Web Access the first ever Web 2.0 service. Is it just having a blog? That doesn’t make Dell a Web 2.0 success. O’Reilly’s original definition was coined before Facebook or YouTube and before blogs were popular and it doesn’t depend on a particular programming language or style. He wanted to explain why Amazon was so successful, why eBay dominated online auctions, how Google was beating everyone else at search. His answer was that they were mining what users thought about the books they were buying, the people they were buying from and the Web pages they linked to and turning that into information for other users.

Web 2.0 is a combination of collective intelligence and network effect, taking user-generated content and metadata and using it to add value, creating applications that get better the more people use them. “Every true Web 2.0 company,” says O’Reilly, “is building a database that grows better with the number of participants.”

Social networks and blogs and interactivity on the Web site are all part of that, but the heart of it is much more structured data. So far, the big Web 2.0 success stories have mostly been companies that started online. If Web 2.0 is really that significant it should help companies who’ve been around for decades as well; how does a blog help if you make shoes or run a phone company? Mostly by letting you turning your customers into unpaid consultants.

The O’Reilly consultants have a fund of amusing mistakes by companies that didn’t get the point, from AT&T saying they wanted to reach out to unhappy customers who were ready to move to another provider - but didn’t want to create a community just to listen to people complaining - to a large consulting firm that was horrified at the idea of letting customers talk to each other.

There was the watch company that cancelled plans to send out images of a new watch to key bloggers because they didn’t want to spoil the effect of their million-dollar launch party and had to watch a grainy picture from a cameraphone go round the blogs instead - making the watch look cheap and nasty. One large retailer declares confidently that ‘none of our employees use Facebook’; that means they’re not in the ‘I hate working here” group trying to find out what’s wrong with the company. Another retailer is spending $2 million on research about shoppers that it won’t see for 13 months, when it will be completely out of date.

A blog won’t fix a company that makes bad products or has terrible customer service; but having a way to hear what customers are saying and respond to it can - if the company is actually able to change. “Going Web 2.0″ for the sake of looking up to date is pointless; using technology to build a relationship with customers is valuable. 

Is any of that the same as Web 2.0 for online services? Not really. And the O’Reilly folks actually admit that. When they talk to a company, they use the term ’social Web’ because Web 2.0 is ‘distracting’.