EarlyStageVC

Who is Google's Next Victim?

A few months ago I posted the following

Google has built a stunning platform for the rapid development and deployment of applications on a worldwide scale.  They have repeatedly taken revenue-generating software categories and made them free, media-supported businesses.  This leverages their economies of scale in delivery and their ability to aggregate, segment, and monetize audiences.   Free is a very effective appeal for a CFO or small business owner looking to reduce IT expense. It may not work for Exxon and GM.  But it doesn’t have to.  If it works for millions of small businesses around the world, it works.

Google is rumored to be working on a slew of new applications for delivery later this year and early next.  I have no idea what they may be or if they really are.  But I would speculate that some are targeted at business use cases that revolve around people, time, content, and communication.   After all, they have Google Home Page, Calendar, Writely, and Gtalk/Mail today.  It is not hard to begin to package them as business process applications and collaboration portals.  Google already has a significant developer community using Google’s APIs for creating mashups with other web services. Motivating them to redirect toward business use cases is a natural extension of  the present. Once you own the process, you own the Control. If the View is the Web, Control is free web-based application, Model will follow.

It is completely conceivable that the future of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise looks a lot like Google 2.0.

Yesterday Google announced it has acquired Jotspot and is making their applications free.  Hmm... So Google is squarely going after horizontal business applications with the Googleplex.  Where do they go next?

Google isn't really trying to capture Microsoft's market value.  I think they are focusing on everyone else first. It is now well understood that Ebay's market cap is squarely in their gunsites with Gpay, Gbase, and Adsense.  Who is Google's next prey?

If I were Eric Schmidt, I'd be salivating over an Google-delivered Intuit killer.

And why not?  It is both consumer and small business focused.  It has high value user data that is suitable for targeting.  It is the ultimately sticky application.  It further leverages Gpay.  It further leveages the small business productivity applications.  The core user base of Adwords and Adsense probably already use Intuit (Quicken or Quickbooks) for accounting. Google could close the loop between marketing, fulfillment, and payment with GBooks.

So while Google is busy re-inventing the media business with targeting and delivery technologies, they can, should, and probably are looking to find applications to inform that targeting system.  What better source of targeting data than where individuals and business are spending their money?

A Work in Process

The overarching drivers in enterprise software in the 1990s were (1) functional automation and (2) platform change.  The platform changes were client-server and then N-tier architectures (a.k.a. Web).  Over the course of the decade every functional unit from back office to front office spawned a category-killer application company – SAP,  Siebel, Remedy, Clarify, etc., all were examples.   

The organizing principle was “who is the buyer?”  The economic buyer was the functional manager looking to automate his/her staff, and IT was the technical buyer.  That is to say IT could kill the deal.  These sales usually included a healthy dose of Accenture/ BearingPoint / etc.  as process glue and outsourced IT staff.   

Those days are over.  And enterprise software is dead.  Or is it? 

Over the last few weeks I have seen several enterprise-focused software companies.  Without revealing specifics, I do note some interesting commonalities.  Needless to say, they are all Software as a Service (SaaS).  But that’s just packaging.  That’s as interesting as saying “and they ship on a CD-ROM” in 1990.  While they are different in more ways than they are similar,  they do share one overall interesting attribute.  They are not focused on functional departments.  They are focused on core business processes.  They are blending Transactional Computing (classic Enterprise SW) with Social Computing (soon-to-be-classic Web 2.0). 

What do I mean by core business processes?  Here is a bunch of examples from a consulting firm called EBS Consulting.

• Assess-to-Develop
• Attract-to-Onboard
• Cash-to-Invest
• Design-to-Deploy
• Engage-to-Close
• Install-to-Maintain
• Order-to-Support
• Plan-to-Act
• Plan-to-Produce
• Plan-to-Reward
• Propose-to-Complete
• Record-to-Measure
• Request-to-Resolve
• Source-to-Settle
• Target-to-Engage
• Track-to-Deploy

There are at least two major reasons why are vendors are emerging to automate processes rather than departments. 

• First, as my friend Jeff Nolan is prone to observe, a large percentage of knowledge worker activity is now in exception management. Exceptions are expensive disruptions of brittle processes. This is where the business case resides.
• Second, the rise of worker mobility and activity outsourcing each contribute to a need to reintegrate processes that span organizational boundaries.  This is where the pain resides.

A second theme shared by these business process SaaS companies is a focus on the middle market.  The buyer motivation is a need for business process integrations, but not with an Enterprise 1.0 price tag. Semi-custom is often good enough.  Change happens frequently in core processes.  You can't afford to overinvest in fully optimized implementations.  Often good enough is good enough.  (It is analogous to the market for electronic systems where product design cycles are longer than product life cycles, leading to families of products based on variants and semi-custom designs. Think the of Sony Walkman as the originator of this strategy twenty years ago.)

Change happens infrequently in peripheral processes, because the operating leverage just isn't there. Peripheral processes can be moved to service businesses (SaaS or traditional services) precisely for this reason.  I think of ADP and similar payroll companies as precursors of this movement.  Payroll has long been a business process  that was handled at the periphery.

So if the last two weeks are any indication, expect to see business processes emerge as an important startup theme in enterprise software in the near future.  And expect to see it in two flavors -- one being process solutions software based on notions of superflexible organizations, the other being services leveraged by software for unbundled, perpipheral services like an ADP. 

Solutions for superflexible core business processes always touch multiple departments.  As an example, think of the latest "strategic partnership" your company created.  Even if the product or service isn't being customized in support of the opportunity, it almost certainly involves changes to pricing models, promotional programs, content, incentives, performance measurement, service level agreements, etc.  It requires a new process; one which cuts across, and integrates with, existing processes and programs.  Can you really afford this strategic partnership?  Can you really afford not to?

In both cases (core and peripheral), the challenge will be "Who is the buyer?" Core processes roll up to general management.  Peripheral processes roll up to functional departments.  I think the natural market for business process software that enables superflexible core business processes will have to be the SMB and middle market.  My intuition is that business process complexity (the number of touchpoints and subprocesses) increases exponentially with organizational size. This explodes the complexity of product design, requirements planning, and decision making.  The Order-to-Dispatch process in a two location plumbing company with a small fleet is a quick solution sell. Maybe even a self-provisioned solution -- a little Google Ad Words, a list SaaS, and Bingo! Contactual is doing exactly this for the Help Desk process The same decision process for Safeway Stores is far more complex, even though each store is a single local, point of presence. It is an impossible order to get (for a startup) in a national organization where fleet-based delivery is core, i.e., Domino's Pizza or UPS.

A word of caution is in order here.  This report of business process-oriented software solutions is based on a supply-side observation.  I am talking about startups who sense (or perhaps hope for) an opportunity.  This is not a demand-side conclusion. Companies are not asking me for these solutions. But why would they?  That's what due diligence is all about. That's why I think this wave is still a work in process.

A Reflection on the Web 2.0 Inflection

Yahoo's warning (and likely associated earnings miss next month) may be a signal of Google sucking the oxygen out of the room.  Or it may signal a real weakening in ad spend.  Here's a disturbing logic chain. Combine this latter possibility with the decline in the real estate sector. One might conclude that the three year old media-spend-driven recovery of the consumer Internet is about to wind down. 

• The weakening real estate sector is a further drag on consumer spending and the economy as a whole. 
• Media spend tends to lag consumer spend.
• Therefore, expect to see disappointing earnings forecasts for Q4/Q1 from consumer and media companies.
• Venture capital investment tends to lag public valuations.
• So expect to see capital to become scarce for Web 2.0 media-supported companies by mid-next year, especially the least monetizable ones (i.e. social [anything]).

Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe YHOO's pain is Google-induced and not market softening.  Maybe real estate isn't the driver most people think it is.  Maybe the war in Iraq will become less of a drag on the economy. Uh huh.

But suppose this does come to pass, whither the erstwhile venture capitalist just trying to eek out a living? Where does the market turn when momentum and speculation end?  It turns to value and fundamentals.  Expect VCs to turn back to the future and re-discover the enterprise market, where customers means buyers and CPA doesn't mean Cost Per Action.

Today there is an emerging sector variously called Office 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0.  There are a lot of interesting companies in the sector already. (You can see a bunch at the Office 2.0 Conference next month.) For the most part, these are companies that solve simple, non-mission critical problems using AJAX, tagging, and many other Webby 2.0 concepts.  It is still a Petri dish of ideas looking for real, high value business problems to solve.  But some of these companies are beginning to find repeatable  sales processes, particularly in the mid-market where the IT departments are leaner and regulatory controls are less severe to combine to encourage more end-user empowerment.  Once this becomes apparent, and once the media roof begins to leak, if not cave in, I suspect we'll see a rebirth of VC interest.

We now know that "2.0" can magically make old feel new.  Seeing this market inflection, some pundit somewhere will not resist the temptation to proclaim the Renaissance to be Enterprise Software 2.0. This proclamation will be followed with road maps for  ERP 2.0, Security 2.0, Document Management 2.0, Supply Chain 2.0, etc.  These products and services will be delivered by Channels 2.0.

I am not kidding. Just wait.

Meme-check - Enterprise & Web 2.0

Gartner has now officially anointed Web 2.0 a bona fide IT trend.  BFD. Of course, they straddled the meme, by putting it at the peak of their 'hype cycle' graph.  That is the consultant's version of plausible deniability.  If it turns out to be real, they called it.  If it is not, they still called it.  This idea has picked up a lot of steam since I first noticed it  ten months ago.  Dion Hinchcliffe and Andrew McAfee are the real thought leaders, emphasizing the technologies and social/managerial impacts respectively.  Dion Hinchcliffe does his usual masterful job of deconstructing some of the elements of this Gartner-validated wave.

Before we all jump on this bandwagon, let's exercise some intellectual restraint and rigor, and in the process perhaps abandon the use of 2.0 as a synonym for "new". The original moniker of Web 2.0 has been used to imply/describe/justify/motivate a collection of concepts that range from standards (like RSS) to technical methodologies (like AJAX) to social phenomena (like personal publishing, rating, and sharing).  Web 2.0 has been as much about sociology as technology. But Enterprises are not just big "collections of consumers" and so let's not graft the same concepts and expect a thousand enterprise flowers to bloom.

First, dispense with the sociology. Enterprises have two core attributes that do not exist as widely in the public web -- purpose and accountability.   So 'empowerment' and 'collective intelligence'  are not end points.  Nor are 'discovery,' 'networking,' nor 'sharing.'   These are embedded in processes and are methods for creating context to purposeful transactions.  A sales forecast is 'collective intelligence.'  Mining customer comments is a form of 'discovery.'  A internal blog post is more likely to be linked to a product release status than photos of my vacation. Viewed in this context, a lot of what passes for (aspiring) businesses in Web 2.0 are simply features of larger processes in the Enterprise. 

So Enterprise 2.0 as a platform shift is mostly about the enabling technologies.  Web 2.0 rode the back of Open Source and Moore's Law to crack the economic barrier in building web based services. What followed were technologies for making applications richer (AJAX), easier to build (Ruby on Rails), and easier to integrate (REST and RSS). 

But only a tiny community of developers have built Web 2.0 apps using AJAX, ROR, or LAMP.  It is really just a few thousand people -- and very few work in large enterprises or ever will, again.   So how will the Enterprise 2.0 apps get built?  I doubt it is from a startup like Jotspot who has no business process expertise nor business data management expertise.  I doubt it is Oracle or SAP who pride themselves on selling Sherman Tanks as radiation-hardened compact cars. The users will build Enterprise 2.0 apps, not the vendors. 

The question is who will "get it" first?

• Will the enterprise application guys (the IT dinosaurs) "get it" about embedding communication and social context in long-running transactions, or
• Will the web 2.0 guys (the IT plankton) "get it" about business processes being the purpose of enterprise community and communication?

Tough call.

Maybe there's a third choice.  Maybe the users will be able to imbue business processes with social computing features. 

The growing consensus is that web-oriented architectures in the form of "mashups" will be the first wave of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.  Maybe, but I think these are going to be niche tools, not mainstream.  Why? Because today's mashups are data mashups and once you have the data, you rarely need it again.  As a test, think about how often you got back to a cool mashup you've seen to re-use it over again. 

This is the promise of process mashups - user-driven, maybe even user-authored, collaborative applications that support core business processes.  Data mashups are the New EII.  Process mashups are the new EAI.  (To be meme-compliant you may want to call them EII 2.0 and EAI 2.0. I don't.)

We are ripe for an breakthrough as big as Visicalc.  The spreadsheet exposed the power of the microprocessor to millions of PC users.  It was and remains the only significant programming tool used by millions of people who know nothing of linting, compiling, scripting, or even looping.   It provides a simple method of assembling data sources to create a custom "application".  The application is really part of a business process, most often a financial process.  A spreadsheet for business processes would be a powerful way to unlock collaboration and process knowledge in Enterprise 2.0.

The Coming Wave of Enterprise Web 2.0

The convergence of consumer apps and enterprise apps as a form of Enterprise Web 2.0 seems to be gaining some traction, at least with the business press. 

• Rob Hof authored an extensive introduction of Web 2.0 for CEOs in BusinessweekOnline today.
• Last week at Dow Jones Enterprise Ventures I was fortunate to moderate a session on the mashup of consumer and enteprise software markets with Cliff Reeves from Microsoft, Jeff Nolan of SAP, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, and Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital.

One of the best thinkers on the topic, Dion Hinchcliffe, tells me that he's seeing very strong interest in his enterprise clients about how to leverage Web 2.0 concepts as well.  It's beginning to feel like the re-kindling of the enterprise software market.

As a VC, I am more interested in understanding the Big Driver than I am timing the investment cycle. As the Internet went from a standing start to a mainstream resource, the ‘killer app’ was email.  The Internet (and I use that term to include the pre-Web era), was a cheap and effective way to communicate.  The very earliest innovations were around the Big Driver of “communication.”  I would argue that even the early Yahoo directory was a White Pages of Web sites. 

In the 80’s and early 90’s relatively few had email (save for academics, and later for Compuserve/ AOL/ Prodigy users).  Remember the sense of mutual enlightenment you had in finding another email user?  By 1998 email addresses were de rigueur on business cards.  Finding someone without an email address was rather exceptional.  Internet communication has gone mainstream.  All the pet food stores on-line built (or attempted to build) businesses on this new, low cost, and universal communication insight.  But the problem with most of these “dot com-ers” was that they all shared the same innovation.  When you have a 20% cost advantage over competitors, you have a huge advantage.  When all competitors take the same 20% component out, they are back to perfect competition.  The big, thematic innovations in the Internet/early Web were about Communication, either 1-to-1 (mail) or 1-to-Many (Commerce & Publishing), and the directory services around them (Search).

The earliest e-commerce and publishing sites were clearly centered on “communication” as the underlying Big Driver.  The original premise of Amazon was to use the Web as a low cost channel to communicate with customers, but using traditional fulfillment channels.  It then moved into a period of chasing the holy grail of Scale, opened logistics centers, and became a black hole for capital. The breakthrough in the business came when Amazon realized they could make a higher ROE selling other’s new and used goods, managing the entire communication process with the user as their value added. 

Collaboration – The New Big Driver
This Web 2.0 era isn’t really about tagging or sharing photos or bookmarks any more than Web 1.0 was about buying pet food online or reading news online.  It is about the emergent property of Collaboration that happens when a critical mass of people (or things) is interconnected and the technologies that facilitate collaboration.

Collaboration can be an End or a Means. When it is an End, it is usually transient.  The rapid ascent and decline of Friendster and the more recent chatter about the waning coolness of MySpace are examples of collaboration-qua-ephemera. Collaboration is much more enduring when it is the means, whether the end is trading collectibles on Ebay or rating others on HotorNot.

Ebay was the first big application of collaboration on the Web. PageRank was arguably the second, taking advantage of the ‘collaboration’ of Web sites to create a derived measure of authoritativeness.  This is no different from today’s Digg, except that the collaboration was implicit rather than explicit.  It is no different from sites that combine explicit tagging and track user behavior to derive how untagged photos/posts should be tagged. 

Collaboration comes in many forms. 

• The Social Computing form is what most of us see every day in Web 2.0. community tagging, etc., are all the most computationally trivial applications of collaboration.   
• Collaborative Filtering methods use popularity (ratings or clickstream) to find structure in chaos.  Amazon, Digg, and even “most emailed articles” on the NYT are forms of collaborative filtering. It may not feel altogether Web 2.0-ish, but it is collaboration nevertheless.
• Markets are a form of collaboration.  The “market price” is a collective judgment of value even when individuals act privately and without regard for each other.

All of these forms of collaboration can be thought of as “discovery” applications.  In fact, economists refer to “price discovery” as the function of a market.  Discovery is the emergent effect when the collaborators are democratically organized, i.e. every input is equivalent and sequencing is irrelevant. 

But a large part of everyday collaboration is not democratic.  Not all inputs are created equal.  Ordering does matter.  Consider the simplistic case of arranging a to meet with someone else.  You can solve a small part of the problem with 1-to-Many Communication, a.k.a. Evite.com from yesteryear. But what if you want to constrain the collaboration a la Real Life, e.g., iterate to find an alternative date to satisfy the objective? Ordering of preferences then matters, and if you are gathering a group, not all attendees are created equal.  This is the kind of thing that drives administrative assistants crazy – a simple example of structured Collaboration.  Generalize this to something more economically meaningful like major customer visits to headquarters, collaboration on developing budgets for next year, or arranging a trade show, and you have yourself a real mess.

This is why I think Enterprise Web 2.0 is different from Consumer Web 2.0. Enterprise’s have goals and structure.  People around the Enterprise collaborate, but the collaboration is (supposed to be) undemocratic, i.e., ordered and non-chaotic.  Ironically, this is not a new category.  We used to call it Workflow and it was on the Known Quicksand Sector list at every VC firm, along with Middleware, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Search.  It was a Known Quicksand because no two implementations looked the same.  Users couldn’t change the workflow to suit their needs. Users couldn’t automate the dozens of little tasks of collaboration that they do every week.

Despite being Known Quicksand, nearly every VC firm has placed a bet on workflow at one time or another. Why? Because the big Enterprise Apps automate you and me and we’re done.  Automating the white space between us is the last untapped source of Big Win in the Enterprise.

This is more than just Workflow.  It is Information Flow.  And it’s not just an inside-the-firewall problem.  In fact, it’s bigger outside than inside.  All the wondrous improvements in personal mobility, communications, and 7x24 information access have exacerbated the problem. Customers, field service, sales people, consultants, outsourcers, telecommuters, suppliers, etc., all suffer the rising expectations of responsiveness that comes with personal automation and the sinking realization associated with the quagmire of complexity when trying involve others. 

Mobile, Web 2.0, SaaS are going to converge into a set of new, lightweight Enterprise Web 2.0 applications. Collaboration is the Big Driver within Web 2.0 and nowhere is collaboration more valuable than when time is money – the time to assimilate information from the enterprise edge and the time to organize and respond.  Prepare to see a wave of Enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration applications in the next 24 months.   And, like every wave, it will be 5% innovation and 95% imitation.

So What Does Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Look Like?

History can help us answer this question.  If you are old enough to remember a world before PCs, then you have an unfair advantage.  (Nice feeling for a change, huh?)  You have seen history repeat twice and are likely to see it happen again.  The answer is The Dominant IT Company defines the landscape for Enterprise IT.  Everyone else follows. 

Past as Prologue
In the Beginning, Enterprise IT was dominated by IBM.  Punched cards and raised floors begat character mode interfaces.  The 3270 terminal was king. Third party apps shoehorned themselves into a model, view, and control (MVC) all defined by IBM. 

This dominance led to the first network effect in computing – the IBM ecosystem.  IBM aggressively policed the ecosystem with the “plug compatible” lock and the pre-emptive product announcement. These practices ensured innovation would die.  Enterprise customers were complicit in the name of compatibility.  Hence the origin of the phrase “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

Personal computers were the original “edge devices.”  Microsoft built a second parallel ecosystem around their model, view, and control by leveraging their ownership of the OS just as IBM did in the glass house of IT. Microsoft now owned the desktop and set the View agenda for Enterprise Applications, and the desktop Model and Control.  Users had little exposure to plumbing.  So Microsoft had less control over the Enterprise data model and control, but retained absolute dominance on the desktop.  End users were complicit supporting in their natural monopoly, again in the name of compatibility. Microsoft learned ever more elegant and aggressive methods of policing this natural monopoly at both the system and application suite levels. 

All the while, the server tier of enterprise computing was born and flourished.  Sun, Oracle, SAP, and many other companies took root in the growing hardware and software server markets.  Client/Server begat Thin Client/Server which begat Three Tier computing.   These server-side software companies wrestled the Model and Control from IBM and its ecosystem, nudging IBM into the last bastion of technology scoundrels -- system integration.

The Present
Five years ago the big threat to Microsoft was thought to be Open Source.  It is clear now that Open Source killed Sun, not Microsoft, with a little help from Intel and AMD.  Today’s Enterprise Model and Control still are in the hands of the legacy Enterprise Software companies. VC investment in Enterprise Software over these same five years has effectively evaporated,  as IT departments moved to strategies of ‘one throat to choke” for software purchases.  The Microsoft monopoly killed desktop innovation as effectively as IBM once did. But software innovation has continued, but at the new "edge” – the Consumer Internet. 

The dominant View is the Web, more so than even MS Windows.  That View is defined by document-centric user interfaces, search boxes, email, and navigation bars.   As work styles have become more mobile, ad hoc, and self-powered, the Web has become the ‘place’ where real work is accomplished.   The Web has evolved from pure communication to collaboration (synchronized communication with a context). 

Today the Enterprise seems to be The Land That Time Forgot. The IT lock-down of the Enterprise (because of TCO, security, compliance, and the complexity of legacy computing) and the innovation of Web Applications (a.k.a. Web 2.0)  have set the stage for a reprise of Users vs. IT just as in the PC revolution. Web Apps are sneaking in through Port 80 just as PCs snuck in the front door twenty years ago, a phenomenon that ultimately wrestled Model, View, and Control from IBM. 

Futureware
As I see it, there are two central themes to Web 2.0 --  user/community collaboration and rapid application development and integration.   Both face challenges from Enterprise IT, but both are inevitably part of the Enterprise Software stack.   I can imagine two parallel futures for Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.

Big Enterprise 2.0
In many ways the penetration of “Mashup-like” technologies should be easy.  A large part of Enterprise IT’s budget is spent on application integration.   The challenge for Mashup techniques will be the balance between ease of use and sophistication.  Arguably Microsoft Office enables desktop mashups today – access multiple information sources with Excel and Access and render new dynamic reports in Word.  But this isn’t easy enough for most users, robust enough for mission critical IT, nor secure enough to place in the cloud for universal access.  Yet the latent demand for a ‘long tail’ of user applications remains – just as it did when we were asking IT to create new custom reports in RPG   thirty years ago.  Mashup technologies will be the future response to empowering end users to create Web 2.0 solutions.

Several years from now the big influence of  Web 2.0 on Enterprise apps won’t look like a Flickr, Mappr, Taggr, or Tiggr behind a firewall.   They won’t look like a wiki, digg,  or a space.  Collaboration will be a feature, not a purpose.  Many if not all Enterprise apps will include tagging, collaborative markup, etc.  But collaboration will become a feature of business process applications the way printing is feature of desktop apps. 

In fact, I think it is a good bet that many Enterprise apps in the Enterprise won’t be in the Enterprise at all. Users collaborate in the cloud, not in the desk.   Think “expense tracking and reporting”, “personnel reviews”, “sales force collaboration,” and all the other micro processes that plague every enterprise, big and small.  By definition, as we work on the road, from home, or on our Blackberries, we remain part of these long running processes that reach outside the firewall.   

Small Enterprise 2.0
Now add Google to the conversation. (It’s now actually illegal in Silicon Valley to have a blog post on software without mentioning Google.)   Google has built a stunning platform for the rapid development and deployment of applications on a worldwide scale.  They have repeatedly taken revenue-generating software categories and made them free, media-supported businesses.  This leverages their economies of scale in delivery and their ability to aggregate, segment, and monetize audiences.   Free is a very effective appeal for a CFO or small business owner looking to reduce IT expense.  It may not work for Exxon and GM.  But it doesn’t have to.  If it works for millions of small businesses around the world, it works.

Google is rumored to be working on a slew of new applications for delivery later this year and early next.  I have no idea what they may be or if they really are.  But I would speculate that some are targeted at business use cases that revolve around people, time, content, and communication.   After all, they have Google Home Page, Calendar, Writely, and Gtalk/Mail today.  It is not hard to begin to package them as business process applications and collaboration portals.  Google already has a significant developer community using Google’s APIs for creating mashups with other web services. Motivating them to redirect toward business use cases is a natural extension of  the present. Once you own the process, you own the Control. If the View is the Web, Control is free web-based application, Model will follow.

It is completely conceivable that the future of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise looks a lot like Google 2.0.  Let’s hope the users aren’t complicit, yet again, using only Google apps because of their interoperabilty.  I'd hate to see innovation evaporate for a third time. It's been so much fun.