Wednesday, November 04, 2009

The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth

I was speaking with someone last night who was attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco who was complaining about how Microsoft has managed to achieve remarkable success with their SharePoint product despite being inferior to start ups like Jive. He then asked if I was attending E2 to which I blithely replied "no, I don't really care about the technology wars." Which is true but incomplete. The more complete answer would have been, "technology is merely the medium we move through in order to get the really interesting things done."

And technology is increasingly a ubiquitous and all encompassing medium.

If businesses were people, technology would be the air they breath. Communications, data collection, decision making systems, etc -- everything a company does is mediated by some kind of technology and this is only accelerating. As more and more information is collected the need for systems which help us use this information become ever more essential.

The most effective companies will be the ones that have the most effective information systems. So I am really not worried about Microsoft wasting people's money with SharePoint -- the companies that use that technology will suffer the consequences. And the businesses that understand the geek-centric reality of 21st century business will succeed. Over time companies like Google, Amazon, and Akamai will teach us to use really good technology to build our businesses. Even Microsoft is beginning to understand -- how do you think Bing works? On Linux servers run by Akamai of course.

So I won't bother with "enterprise 2.0" which has become a writhing pit of technology vendors trying to insult our intelligence with ridiculous claims about their products, and instead I will continue to focus on real business problems and their solutions, safe in knowing that ultimately the best technology will win out because it will create the most value for the smartest companies -- that is, the geek shall inherit the earth.