The Weekend Australian Financial Review ran a two-page spread on Web 2.0 entitled BOOM! Old business besotted by new internet. While the title sounds promising what Dierdre Macken’s excellent article essentially boils down to is the failure of Australian business to grasp (or more accurately, come to terms with) the concepts behind Web 2.0:
- communities
- collaboration
- the shift in the way business is done
- the value proposition of going Web 2.0
The fight between top-down corporate ownership of data and knowledge, and the bottom-up community-driven approach deeply challenges many of the old world. They are unable or unwilling to make the mental shift needed to cope. From the article:
When I go into business meetings, I meet really smart people sitting there sweating tears of blood, looking across the table doing their best to make out they know more than us because they have to contain the meeting [SC - my emphasis]. Really what they’re doing is writing little mental notes, desperately trying to keep up, with this sense that there’s an earthquake happening and it’s got terrible consequences for everyone.
David Bolliger, CEO Tilefile
It’s no longer about command-and-control, folks. Among a myriad of other things, it’s about surrendering control in the interests of keeping eyeballs (stickiness), encouraging contribution - good and bad.
I’d point you to the article, but the AFR’s subscription-based site is awful and expensive. I’ve kept the paper version and am happy to email a scanned PDF to anyone that wants one. Or, if anyone out there has a link to the text of the article, I’d appreciate it.
Hi there,
I would really appreciate the scanned version of this article! I am a PhD Student at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and I have been working on a seriously kick-ass Web 2.0 start-up… only problem is that over in the UK (and many other places outside Silicon Valley I’m sure) the people within the funding system simply don’t understand that the world is shifting! Safe-betting is the name of the game! By the sounds of it, this is a problem in Australia too - perhaps it’s a British Empire thing?! I lived in Sunnyvale, CA when I was 3 years old and I’m genuinely considering ditching my life here and moving back.
Cheers for the mix of web & enterprise articles - keep it up!!!