Gil Yehuda wrote a very good post today Enterprise 2.0 Thoughts to end the week. He talks about Enterprise 2.0 maturity, second wave adoption, focus on work, and levels of the conversation. It's a great post you should read in full and reflect on. One particular point caught my attention; Gil says: "... having a wiki, forum, blogs, etc. on the intranet and using a wiki, forum, blog effectively to improve the transparency and productivity of collaboration are very different indicators of progress."
This new, nastier competition does not depend on continued IT innovation. It only depends on continued managerial innovation. If all the technology vendors were to close up shop tomorrow competition in all industries would not eventually revert to where it was prior to the mid-1990s. The current IT toolkit lets companies propagate business ideas faster, more broadly, and with higher fidelity. That's all that's necessary to increase the pace of competition, and to keep it high. Of course, the tech vendors are not about to shut themselves down and we'll see a lot more innovation from them; this will only serve to further increase competitive nastiness. But technology innovation is the icing on the cake of managerial innovation. - Andrew McAfee; Curb My Enthusiasm