One memory of FASTforward07, was the confidence/credibility Ray Lane instilled when he spoke of his belief that Oracle and SAP are positioned survive the challenges of 2.0 because of their investments in R&D.

In comments to a recent post of mine, Atul Rai drew attention to a post of his own about SAP and Oracle’s foray into 2.0 space.

It would seem that SAP is dedicated to more than the “lipstick on a pig” routine (as has been witnessed elsewhere). They’ve ripped a page from Disney’s playbook by creating their own Imagineering group, yet add a specific goal for differentiation: “Incorporate new ways of using emerging Web 2.0 technologies to harness the power of its customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software into tools that are easy to use, engaging and eminently attractive to an increasingly younger and tech-savvy mix of employees and customers.”

I can’t figure out the trend of justifying these investments based on satisfying demanding youth: “We’re focused on bridging the generation gap and figuring out the best ways to engage this new generation of digital natives who are ADD — and have their IM and their iPods and multiple other things going all at once — to find out how they will work in the enterprise of the future.” I’ve been screaming about the issues these approaches solve since I was their age, way before we knew that we too were AD/HD (the more appropriate term in formal circles).

The challenge still remains to see how well the work of a ‘spinoff’ can be integrated back to the mother ship. Of course, if they do so in true 2.0 style, it won’t matter, because they’ll leapfrog the mother ship (culture and all).

I was shocked once again this past week as a colleague pooh-poohed the messages of another FASTforward07 speaker, Chris Anderson. He seems to get no respect for his model of untapped potential. Enterprise Solutions are classic embodiments of Chris’s model, only the potential is even greater. The opportunity is to flatten the high end and move it to the right. Enterprise solutions embody two fundamental design flaws: 1) they embrace “a” business model – making them inherently wrong for EVERY business model and 2) they’re designed for “a” person, making them ill-suited to EVERYONE. The beauty of the fundamentals of The Long Tail, is that the model (esp. “shortening the distance”) reinforces the value of solutions designed to address individual needs (including optimized interfaces for different accessibility needs). There is huge untapped potential in these specialized interfaces and functions – potential that will unseat massive, endless designs positioned for the elusive EVERYONE.

Even Microsoft seems to understand the value of this approach by its commitment to the Expressions collection (I’m checking out Blend as a mechanism for presentations/prototypes). These offerings will gain tremendous potential when .net extensions are supported. Effectively, those of us who design front-ends can design them just the way we want them to look/behave and developers don’t have to (get to) touch them at all.