AccMan never knowingly under opinionated

The next big thing – digestion

Over the last couple of weeks it seems there has been a dearth of ‘new’ or rather interesting things to comment upon. Perhaps we’re in that period that Jeff Nolan describes as ‘the new incrementalism’ where:

As I survey the landscape of consumer and business focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment. Something like Twitter is ground breaking in terms of break out adoption, but what about the other 10,000 startups? There are few bold “ah-hah” ideas, lot’s of social this or that, and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas. Will we suffer through yet another “year of the mobile web” or “the semantic web”?

More likely at least some of us are stuck in a Twitterverse where instant conversation means more than considered blog post reading. Jeff’s point is well made but then I think Vinnie Mirchandani is nearer the mark when he adds:

As I have said many times, there is no magic "innovation" IT budget. You have to show the CIO and business executives ways to chisel existing spend to justify budgets for your cool stuff.

The same is true for professionals. In one sense UK buyers are fortunate. We can watch from afar as money is poured into startups in the US and observe as the me-toos pile up against one another in the vain hope that one or other will gather traction while awaiting the inevitable 90%+ fallout.

But while both Jeff and Vinnie’s arguments fit well with the  enterprise world I sense we’re in a period of digestion. The arguments around whether saas/on-demand is the next big thing – at least from a professional standpoint – have yet to sink in though I see plenty of signs that we’ve moved beyond the ‘curious interest’ stage to one of at least dabbling.

Jeff talks about FriendFeed but when taken together with that other service du jour Twitter, they merely represent features of a much broader alternative to existing methods of communication and collaboration. They can easily be replicated, extended and taken to a new place where value is obvious rather than implied. Who’s doing that I wonder? I’ve seen signs at places like HiveLive but the technology needs to deliver something meaningful and so far we only have glimpses. Bring on the case studies that all can understand.

I’m with Jeff when he says we live with the curse of Web 2.0 as somehow representing a blurring of the lines between business and consumer. But I’m far from convinced that we have seen what this means for developers building for business.

We may be short of head turning innovations that make us go ‘wow’ but then incremental isn’t bad. Evolution rather than revolution has, after all, seemed more comfortable.