Many years ago, when I first started working with Al-Noor, he used to say “Show them a Ford Escort. Ask them what’s wrong with it. Don’t start with a blank piece of paper. Show them something. Something that works. Then they can really tell you what they want”.

When we started out at Connectbeam in Dec 2005 – I don’t think Enterprise 2.0 term was even around. The momentum and buzz in the market was all around consumer. We were chastised with some real strong language for our vision of what we were setting out to do (“2.0 technologies for the enterprise”).
But we felt it in our gut that inevitably lot of this new technology that was playing itself out in the consumer space would inevitably move into the enterprise. And the way it will manifest itself inside the enterprise will be different from the consumer space.

We placed our bet on building a foundation around Social Bookmarking for bringing Enterprise 2.0 technologies into the enterprise. We viewed Social Bookmarking as offering two key strategic advantages over other Enterprise 2.0 derivative technologies – ease of use, and a handshake to the past, resulting in first to gain mass adoption (inside the enterprise).
Ease of use came in two ways:
1. Everyone’s bookmarked something or the other in their life (bookmarking is as old as the browser)
2. It could be easily bolted on top of existing enterprise infrastructure (enterprise search, portal, document management, and more…)

This bolting on top of existing infrastructure provides the ‘handshake’ to the past or as you put it – “Show them a Ford Escort. Ask them what’s wrong with it. Don’t start with a blank piece of paper…”

This is what customers are liking about our solution. While the technology is disruptive in delivering productivity and value add, it is not disruptive in how it is deployed and made available and accessible. Users are seamlessly transitioned into a Web 2.0 Connectbeam application from their existing applications.

I would welcome an opportunity to showcase to you Connectbeam and get your feedback and perspective. I’d also like to discuss use cases with you at few of the companies where we are talking about 50,000+ named user deployments.

Hope you are recovering and feeling better.

Best,
Puneet
http://www.connectbeam.com

First usable version of Windows? IMO it was 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups I think it was called) – when Windows 3.0 came out I was using a Mac, so it was no comp. XP is fine – even enjoyable at times; and Vista is starting to sound like concrete boots. Maybe Linux will get it’s act together in time to take the desktop – I’m playing around with the Ulteo alpha release (http://www.ulteo.com/main/) ATM … Eric Raymond has some interesting stuff to say about the Linux desktop opportunity at http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html

Think I’d rather be in Cape Town than Sydney. Definitely rather be in bed with a bunch of grapes than at work, although you have taken rather extreme measures to get there.

First usable version? Moot point.

You have shown me the Ford Escort. Now I want overlapping windows and everything else that came in Windows 3.0, the first usable version.

This is certainly “putting crap in the way”, but not even carefully.