> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.