A: O’Reilly is well known for defining Web 2.0 as a computing platform - a new sort of operating system. My belief is that the key differentiation between the early Web and Web 2.0 is the emergence of sociality, where the individual displaces the group as the basic organising unit, and information flows principally through social relationships. More than just the buzzword, Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling enterprises across all industries towards a new way of doing business through user participation, openness, and network effects.

A: William Gibson once said, “The future is here already, it’s just unevenly distributed.” There are a lot of companies - Intel, Cisco, Booz Allen, Sun - that are getting a great deal from Web 2.0 tools, and a bazillion others at the foot of the adoption curve.

A: Web 2.0 is not about competitiveness, per se. Web 2.0 allows companies to organise themselves in different ways, to operate differently, to connect with consumers and marketplaces in newer ways. So, competitiveness is a secondary benefit. If you are looking for a single quality to help clarify the impact of Web 2.0, consider resilience, since Web 2.0 seems to broaden the company’s ability to respond to challenges.

The way to get going is to start now, based on where you are. Investing in experiments around social media to connect more deeply with customers and partners could be a good start. Crowd sourcing innovation - drawing on the smarts distributed across the company and outside, in the user community - is another big bang that companies need to be exploring. And internal micro-streaming (micro-blogging) is an upcoming and likely area for most companies to start looking at.

A: I strongly believe it’s odd that so many companies have historically built up their own IT teams. One of the first jobs I had after getting my Masters in Computer Science was at a small software consulting firm that had taken over compiling projects of insurance companies that had started decades earlier. These companies had thought it would be a competitive advantage, in the ‘70s, to develop their own version of COBOL or FORTRAN. Looking back, we laugh! And it kept a small firm in business, cleaning up the mess that these people created, and moving their programmes to new architectures long after the guys who dreamed that stuff up had retired. The new craze is for the enterprise to build all this Web 2.0 technology internally because they ‘can’t find anything that meets their requirements’. That is usually someone who wants to build an empire.

On the other hand, it may be the case that the various bits and pieces that a company wants to use don’t fit well together. But I still think an external specialist should be brought in to do the integration, rather than building the equivalent team internally.

A: I don’t understand this point of people worrying about security while deploying Web 2.0 tools. It can run on physically secure servers behind a company’s firewall, if needed. I think like true love, even security is overrated. By the same yardstick, even applications in the cloud can be secure.

A: Indeed they will. One of the big drivers for Web 2.0 adoption is that people have become used to certain applications in everyday life because they are simple and fun and then want to use them in the context of business. To the extent that business can loosen up and accept that it’s ok to enjoy using tools the better off they will be. Good food not only is nourishing, but tastes good, and the enterprise software world seems to have forgotten that lesson, in general.