Om Malik sums up some of the issues surrounding Web 2.0 and the enterprise well in a piece called The Myth, Reality & Future of Web 2.0

The Web 2.0 apps leverage cheap hardware, open standards and availability of plentiful bandwidth. Inside the firewall, bandwidth is many times what we have on the public Internet. Cheap hardware and open standards are pretty much a given in any enterprise. But more importantly, the size of the audience is predetermined, and the operating environment is more controlled. This eliminates some of the issues of scale and scalability associated with consumer-facing applications.

And frankly, most enterprise applications could use a serious makeover.

[He’s links to some great articles and there’s an interesting discussion off the back of it, so it’s worth a read in full].

I’m beginning to get a little weary of the top-down vs bottom-up divide.
It’s a small point, but isn’t the real paydirt what you might call the side-to-side?

In 1982(ish), I was given a BBC Micro by my father. It had a tape drive attached. And when I wanted to play a game, written by someone some distance away from me, I could hear the tape loading the code up into my machine. It always excited me, that sound of a new game and the treat in store.

In 1994(ish), I got my first modem. And to connect to the internet, via Compuserve, I could hear the dialup, and the connection. It sounded much like the old tape drive. And while I listened to it, waiting to connect to people miles away from me, I’d get a similar sense of excitement at the World Wide Web I was about to be able to stumble through and explore.

In 2003(ish) I started blogging. There was no noise, but I still had that excitement. It amazed me to be able to read people’s thoughts, from London to North America to Iraq to India, and then later to meet some of them. The world started to seem a lot smaller.

This morning, again there was no tape-drive noise, and again things were quick. I’ve become inured to it, I suppose. I expect a certain level of service, in the same way I expect running water from the taps, or electricity from the wall sockets.

But when I fired up Skype and I got that weird popping sound, I remembered the digital crackling noise. And not for the first time it struck me quite how astonishing it is to be connected. My friend Rajesh has just come back online after lunch in Mumbai, and the bloke in the US whose forum software I’m looking at is probably still asleep. And to briefly stop and think about how different their surroundings are from mine, how talented they are, and how far away they are drives home an often forgotten point.

It’s a huge world, I’m a miniscule part of it, and I feel very lucky to be connected, and excited to be stumbling my way through it.

Anyway, back on the testosterone supplements soon.