Proof that working for IBM can fry your brains

Courtesy of an email from fellow SAP Mentor Jon Reed I read what counts as one of the most breathtaking pieces of enterprise software commentary I’ve seen this year. It should serve as a warning to any professional who has been wowed by what they see happening on the consumer web. The piece comes from 30 year ex-IBM’er and marketer Mike Moran. He says in relation to enterprise software, Google and Facebook:

Each of these new players [Google and Facebook] has a particular strength that marks it as a potential threat to enterprise software vendors [such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc.] Google commands attention because it can offer things for free, subsidized by a proven advertising model. And Facebook has an edge because it has collaboration built in, allowing applications to feed off the relationships that people have across companies.

Outstanding. It gets better:

Consider how Google uses Gmail. It promises not to divulge your private email to anyone, but it regularly examines it (with its computers) so it can provide targeted advertising based on what your email tells it you are interested in. Likewise, Facebook has regularly mined its profiles, in sometimes controversial attempts to personalize advertising to users.

How powerful would that model be inside an enterprise? Perhaps the price for powerful, free, low-support software would be allowing Google a peek inside that firewall.

Please – don’t laugh yet. I’ve saved the best for last:

I certainly don’t know what Google and Facebook are planning, but they have the intrinsic capabilities and the market position to wake up the sleeping enterprise software market.

Don’t get me wrong. I love edge thinking and challenges to the norm, wherever they may emerge. Disruption in the enterprise software market is what gets me out of bed each day. Bringing enterprise IT costs down is my meat and potatoes. Bringing the best of the consumer web to business is something I hope all vendors are thinking about. But I’m afraid this line of thinking is over the edge. It is beyond The Edge of Reason.

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