It’s beginning to look a lot like Enterprise 2.0

Cannot be a fluke.

He was using the same examples in yet another presentation. I had seen Andrew McAfee present at Cognizant Community on the possibility of the metric system as currently defined running out of definitions for things like our exploding storage. I had seen him joke about DARwin the robot and the Google autonomous car. Then I saw him use the examples again in his talk at the GE event Thursday.

So, I walked up and complimented him. This is so much more real-world (and GE had real customers and eye-popping economics during the course of the day to make it interesting to real executives) than the Enterprise 2.0 world his previous books and speeches focused on.  That was about collaboration and the feel good vibe of how that will change the world. It mostly ignored the growing Internet of Things. There was little place for algorithms and analytics in the celebration of blogs and wikis. It had few solid payback stories. In  a word it was aspirational. I found myself debating with him here, here and elsewhere. I even called the Enterprise 2.0 moniker pompous

To his credit, he started a social movement which manifests itself in Austin every year and in numerous other events and communities. But social has morphed considerably in the last few years. It is not just about people but also products. The exciting part of social is not the internal group hug but the external  sentiment analysis and other marketing analytics that Salesforce, Oracle and others are maturing. 

Andy looks so comfortable now talking machines and analytics and storage. Time for his old Enterprise 2.0 fans to similarly move beyond Kumbaya.