When Galileo claimed the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around, certain of his contemporaries were scandalized. Nowadays, most modern scientists view his discovery (which was discovered by Copernicus, too) as a revolutionary discovery. When Einstein published his theories of relativity, they, too, were hailed as revolutionary. Einstein, unlike Galileo, said that all motion is relative motion and that the motion of one object only exists relative to the position of another object and that the selection of that other object was more or less an arbitrary decision. In other words, whether the Sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth revolves around the Sun is determined purely by the arbitrary selection of one reference point over another. Nobody really likes to admit this, but this means that not only was the Catholic Church wrong, so was Galileo.

So not only do heavenly bodies revolve around each other in a circular motion, so do scientific revolutions. There is nothing new under the sun, says the author of Ecclesiastes. Everything comes and goes.

Enterprise 2.0 is not a revolution, although it is a reality. The laws of gravity are still in effect, as are the laws of competition.

Network effects in open systems operate differently than do network effects in proprietary systems and the primary difference in the overall business environment that Enterprise 2.0 represents is the fact that businesses now compete in an open environment and the process of (and prospects for) sustaining competitive advantage in this environment are different.

The big and totally obvious difference is that in open systems, the technology itself does not provide a sufficient barrier to entry. The network is not the network of people who use a given technology (like the pervasive network of Microsoft Word users) because anybody can use the technology (or platform). The network is the network of ideas that are expressed on the platform and the connections that are made between them.

Anyone who has been in management for any appreciable period of time will be aware of what seems to me to be the two most common employee complaints:

This is the problem, really. Employees need information to do their job - the more timely and the more relevent the information they receive is, the better they can do their job. The trouble is that communicating takes time and if you spend all your time communicating then you have little time left for actually doing any work. The technologies that are said to create the environment possible for this new kind of enterprise to emerge represent tools that have created marginal improvements in the efficiency of communication among individuals in groups. Does this marginal efficiency improvement represent a paradigm shift or is it a tipping point? I doubt it. It is still important though, because most technological improvements do not translate into sustained competitive advantage. Instead, they simply become the cost of doing business and businesses have to adopt it to keep up with their competitors.

On a related note, here are some thoughts about IT investments and productivity (just hunches at this point, really):

This is why some folks think that investments in IT have not improved productivity. One theory why this is true is that the increase in competitiveness drives down costs (and profits), hence measurable productivity increases are not apparent.

As an example, let's take a look at the ubiquitous office memo:

As the marginal costs of producing one more memo decreases, the more memos that are likely to be created. The relative value of creating one more memo ends up being equivalent to the cost of creating one more memo, so there really isn't any true improvement. Making it cheaper to produce memos isn't the right kind of efficiency improvement. You want to enable employees to produce better memos.