Facebook, Myspace and IBM

Looking around at all these sites (facebook, slide, ning.com, digg.com, myspace etc) I am amazed how little innovation is going on in the Internet right now. Everybody is doing basically the same old stuff (forums, comments, pictures, videos, friends) and rename them and combine them in all the possible way, and make them fancy (when they can afford it) with AJAX and cool javascript and DHTML. Everybody seems to want to produce the best technology to enable users to perform various tasks such as : link with friends, create your own network of friends, see what your friend is doing, etc. It is the same gigantic effort Microsoft performed to make the window operating system easy to understand and use by home users.

I have seen something similar in the enterprise software industry. Many major companies (Oracle, Microsoft, CA, SAP) tried to create the best possible technology. In the end the those technologies have become so good and similar that users would not choose anymore based on the technology. All those companies provide software with roughly the same functionalities, so in a sales competition for a contract there is really no winner from a technical perspective.
This was good news for sales people because it made them the important differentiating piece. They are the one that are actually winning the contracts by working their contacts, networking with clients, bribing the decision makers, so that they would buy their software and not the software from the competition.

This trend allowed salespeople to get bigger commissions and paychecks from their companies. Oracle for example now sells services for open source software, and they include heavily open source software in their products, because Larry Ellison came to the conclusion that technology does not matter anymore, is as good as it will ever be (you can make it better, but with little or no gain for a business).

He is not saying that in public (not about all his products, for example he said Oracle database is the best database - because is made by them - but when it comes to operating systems where they don't have anything of their own, then the message is that Linux is as good as any other OS is from a business perspective, and is also is free :)

For example, the most common business model that major corporations applied in eastern Europe , was to hire ex secret service generals and high ranking retired guys to lead their subsidiaries. These guys with all their connections in the secret service, in politics were the perfect salesmen for enterprise software.

I think is safe to say that with all this flurry of social networking and video sites flavors and combinations web users will not look for technology and rich feature anymore. This happened in enterprise software also, where companies now come and ask only for something simple that they need

I think that in the end good technology is nice to have, but in the end the way you sell it is the most important.

There is no use for upstarts to have facebook created all over again. It is more important to find a message, tell people that is new and is not used by all the others, than to create a new cutting edge module and hope for people to spread the word around about how wonderful it is.

Sometime and old car van with no modern featured can be more fun to drive than a new Ferrari if you have a purpose to drive it!