Esther and Fred are right that at least in some specific areas like lightweight web services, the flow of technology has reversed. This creates an interesting opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors who,. like us, are on the look out for ways of using services developed for consumers as a framework for business services.
But figuring out which consumer technologies will work in a business context requires taking the analysis a step further. The interesting question is… why has the flow of technologies reversed? I think there are two key drivers. The first is the maturity of the information technology infrastructure, and the second is the increasing complexity of information services.
The maturity of the IT infrastructure has dramatically reduced the capital required to create and deliver an innovative web service. When we invested in del.icio.us, Joshua Schacter was already supporitng over 50,000 users on borrowed hardware with less than a $200,000 investment. That was possible because Joshua was able to use the rich development environment that surrounds Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl (the LAMP Stack), and cheap commodity hardware. He also did not need to build a communications network to enable users to get to his service. He could coount on the Internet. Contrast that development effort with the development of the early internet, where expensive mainframe computers were linked together with dedicated communications circuits. That would not have happened without the support of the govenrment.
The second driver is complexity – A friend of ours mentioned last week that by the late 90s the typical enterprise software suite had over 4000 separate features. The most he had avery seen used in any installation was 750. These systems just got too complex for anyone to be able to use all of the features effectively. Contrast that with the current generation of consumer web services. The most obvious example is Google. When it first came on the scene it was a box on the screen into which you typed what you were looking for. Consumer web services tend to do one thing well.
So it is not surprise that business users are ning to capitalize on the rapid pace of innovation on top of the LAMP stack and that business users are rebelling against the uneccassary complexity of the current generation of enterprise software and ning to use tools from their own experince as consumers that are much simpler and easier to use.
All of this suggests that the best enterprise implementations of consumer web services will be lightweight and easy to use.