Tim Berners-Lee made a lot of people unhappy not long ago when he suggested that there wasn’t all that much new about Web 2.0.  From a purely evolutionary technology point of view, he may be right but it seems to me that what has changed dramatically with the widespread adoption of social software is a greatly improved user experience.   

Web 1.0, with its static, read-only HTML pages, was basically a one-trick pony. It was like the 13-inch Philco TV that came into my parents’ house in 1956–so amazing that you didn’t mind the snow and the test patterns, at least until better technology came along. But, as the nice folks at Philco found out, user experience is a moving target that ultimately separates winners from losers in the marketplace.   

And, if the early Web technologies quickly frustrated users, consider traditional Office software which has been around so long that it has become boring, routine and mind-numbing to most users.  For kids now entering the workplace who are younger than Excel (1985 for the Mac, 1987 for Windows) and have grown up with video games and lot of interactive consumer technology, the thought of spending their work days in a cubicle trying to find the right piece of information in customer relationship management and sales contact databases, supply chain and inventory systems, websites and web pages and e-mail systems, is not all that appealing.  “Death by navigation” is how IDC describes it in an Executive Brief titled “Getting Results by Empowering the Information Worker:  What Web 2.0 Offers Beyond Blogs and Wikis” available here.    

“Most workers spend a lot of time toggling between applications to retrieve data they need to do their jobs. They waste an enormous amount of time and they get worn down by the tedium and frustration of trying to find relevant information. Productivity and morale suffer,” says Shahar Kaminitz, CEO of a startup called Seredipity Technologies, which is developing Web 2.0 applications that address these common problems by providing a more “consumer-like” user experience to information workers.

Kaminitz says the new Serendipity Worklight software platform, to be released in late January, will dramatically improve user experience by adapting to enterprise use many of the Web 2.0 technologies that have driven the spectacular growth and popularity of social software on the consumer side of the web.  The result, the IDC Executive Brief suggests, is could be happier, more productive knowledge workers. Hey, who says work shouldn’t be fun?