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Debate rages: should enterprise software look like Facebook?

by Joe McKendrick

March 4, 2010 at 9:19 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, raised quite a ruckus across the blogopshere in recent days with his declaration that enterprise software should look like Facebook. What does this mean?

Benoiff wrote that he originally used to wonder “why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” He pondered at the time that applications should be run from a simple Website, without software or hardware to install and pricey consultants to hire. That was the inspiration for Salesforce.com, he says. Now, he says, enterprise software needs to adopt the collaboration and social networking aspects of sites such as Facebook: “We need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time….”

While Benoiff used his declaration to make a blatant pitch for his latest “Chatter” feature, his point is worth some healthy debate. After all, when the Web and commercial Internet first emerged in the early 1990s, nobody immediately connected the dots between Websites and enterprise applications, which were largely accessed via industrial-strength green-screen terminals directly attached to back-end behemoths. Nevertheless, a decade later, every enterprise application was accessible through a front-end browser, which had become the new norm.

Critics, such as Charles Zedlewski in a follow-up post, argue that Facebook is more of a consumer entertainment venue than a serious, behind the firewall mission-critical application. And, it can be argued that Facebook is the flavor of the month, and two or three years from now, some other type of service will have captured the imagination of fickle consumers.

Actually, the evolution of enterprise software already began a number of years ago, even before Facebook began its existence as a college students’ online meet & greet. I mentioned the dramatic move to Web browser-style interfaces in the 1990s. Now, even without the influence of Facebook, enterprise software is feeling the powerful tug of social networking and Enterprise 2.0, and endpoints will continue to evolve to a collaborative look and feel that enables end-users to maintain their own virtual areas, sharing data and content for a multitude of purposes.

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Jon HusbandMarch 4th, 2010 at 5:16 pm

Real-time (or near-real-time) exchanges and flow are inevitable, I think.

seamus walshMarch 4th, 2010 at 5:24 pm

Sure, why not? The taxonomy becomes the machine.