Robespierre 2.0

There a revolution brewing in the software world. But there are lots of factions and hard to see who the revolutionaries and royalists are

Some of the factions I have seen just in the last week:

a) I defend the CIO here and here but question incumbent vendor models. The new world of Enterprise 2.0 cannot just be a Web 2.0 layer on top of Enterprise 1.0, but needs to fix a number of things wrong with incumbent vendor models.

b) A camp questioning the entire current IT establishment (CIO AND incumbent, status quo vendors) - some of the reader comments on this blog

"There's a growing camp of believers in the Enterprise 2.0 story that personally don't care what the CIO is interested in because the CIO is not their target. It's an LOB sell with a liberating story for user/knowledge workers."

"The view that CIOs are docile sheep getting squeezed by the megavendors is simply disingenuous. It takes two to tango. Talk is cheap, many CIOs will continue the current state of few vendors and megabudgets (putting in complicated systems from megavendors) and push systems to users because it suits them."

" 1. Is the CIO in a position to take on the mantle you suggest?
2. What about the incumbents rotting from within with their outdated data centric, inflexible models in a world where flexibility and agility are the order of the day?"

c) The Office 2.0 view of the future "Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think."

d) Defenders of the status quo vendors question "weak"  emerging alternatives or say there really is  not much new. Thomas Otter calls out  emerging HR/job board functionality. Rod Boothby calls web alternatives to MS Office a "niche" even as he signs up to present at the Office 2.0 conference. Nick Fera - "Business users have been doing this very thing over and over again for many years (thus the "20.0").  Look at e-mail, chat solutions, IM.  All of these were available publicly and used long before corporate IT ever deployed a single line of code for any one of these solutions.  There's nothing new about the process of Enterpise-readying new software applications, just the name.  The key is what's necessary to make them suitable for businesses."

e) Status quo vendors even question their current patrons, the CIOs. Charles Zedlewski of SAP in a comment on his blog "I also don't care if CIO's see art or passion in a great software product. That doesn't affirm or negate its greatness. If they refuse to pay money for it, well that's a different story."

Exciting, scary, treacherous times ahead.