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Delight and inspire

Comments[1] by Dave in Blogging

Anil Dash: The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time.

[...]

When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.

A great post by Anil Dash, VP and chief evangelist at blog software vendor SixApart. There are counter examples. I mean, who really spends a delightful and inspiring Friday evening with SAP? But generally I agree. Those of us who make enterprise software have a lot to learn from the consumer market.

And it reminds me of my old Dave on software post.



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Comments:

I agree that Anil stretches the truth a bit when he writes:

The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time

But other than SAP, I don't think there are many applications that have succeeded in the enterprise that has not also succeded in the home. The reason SAP hasn't succeded in the home, is because there's no real use-case or purpose for it there. In fact, it shouldn't be in the enterprise either, at least not for most employees. I envision a Twitter Enterprise Edition that would knock SAP off its pedestal hands down.

Posted by Asbjørn Ulsberg on August 13, 2007 at 10:32 AM EDT #

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