
"What took us a weekend to do, has taken 18 months here." - Anon84
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/building-the-legacy-systems-of.html
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diN0bot
> "While I agree that the enterprise is about control and the web is about
> emergence, I don't think this negative characterization is all that useful.
> It seems to imply that the enterprise's orientation toward control springs
> fully formed from the minds of an army of petty controlling middle managers.
> I don't think that's the case."

Control and closed-ness is far more endemic. It stems from marketing and
sales, which are much more important to the profit-driven stock owners who are
really in charge. For example, Amazon tries to get users to stay on their site
longer and buy more. It has little to do with technology coolness or a sincere
connection with users. Contrast that with a web company trying to fain a
foothold with innovation and collaboration.

I don't get the rest of the article. Could he not plainly state that there is
a difference in openness and closedness between the two cultures? He already
mentions APIs, which sums up the point pretty well. Maybe he's trying to say
we can learn from the bumbling insincerity of enterprises?

My take is to stop writing about differences or produce more muck. Just focus
on sincerely making good things. Lead by example without bullshit. I see great
things happening all the time in this direction.

~~~
andreyf
Strange that you left out the follow-up for that, I thought it was the most
insightful part of the article:

 _It seems to imply that the enterprise's orientation toward control springs
fully formed from the minds of an army of petty controlling middle managers. I
don't think that's the case._

 _I suspect it's more likely the result of large scale system dynamics, where
the culture of control follows from other constraints. [...] Once you have
GAAP, Sarbox, domain-specific regulation like HIPAA, quarterly expectations
from "The Street," decades of MIS legacy, and the talent acquisition realities
that mature companies in mature industries face, the strange attractors in the
system will pull most of those shards to roughly the same place. In other
words, the IT enterprise is about control because large businesses in mature
industries are about control. On the other hand, the web is about emergence
because in this time, place, and with this technology discontinuity, emergence
is the low energy state._

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fauigerzigerk
I agree with some of his points, but he ignores the economics of starting
something when he says that "all the cool kids will have moved on to building
sea floor geo-thermal something-or-others".

No teenage coolness will ever overcome the fact that starting industrial
ventures requires lots of capital whereas computer programming (hacking as
it's called here) does not. Powerful tools combined with low capital
requirements is always going to attract a lot of experimentation.

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jacobscott
This writing in this article reminds me of the science fiction Charles Stross
writes. It has lots of interesting points on enterprise IT versus web 2.0, but
imho would have been a better read if it was a little bit more
straightforward.

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andreyf
While some parts here are interesting, this is pure silliness:

 _...it's a realization that the fun part of the web is probably more behind
us than ahead of us_

tehehe. I guess, with time, we'll see...

