The always-impressive Dion Hinchcliffe sums it all up perfectly in his post, “CoIT: How an accidental future is becoming reality“.  Hinchcliffe repurposes Computerworld’s Scott Finnie’s use of ‘CoIT’ as referring to the ‘consumerization of IT’ to a new term, ‘Cooperative IT.”  I’d like to humbly suggest yet another interpretation of CoIT as a shorthand for “Converged IT” – referring to a world where much of the work of the IT organization has converged with the business as a deeply embedded capability.

A Vision for CoIT

Hinchcliffe suggests some aspects for the vision of CoIT as embodying:

• Decentralized (or at least distributed) governance
• IT support that scales up to the new app/device proliferation
• Business led IT solutions with an enabling infrastructure

I think these are appropriate, though many details and realities to be yet worked through.  And, I believe, while the IT leaders who are most proactive in leading this shift will make some mistakes, they will also be the first to figure out the new realities and will ultimately make less mistakes and learn more quickly than their ‘ostrich’ counterparts who either believe this will all blow over, or that they can figure it out down the road.

What do you think?  Do you agree with Hinchcliffe’s vision?  What are you doing to exploit the emerging ‘converged’ reality of CoIT?

Digital Art: ‘Convergance’ by Wilby  courtesy of Iasos.

For IT Leaders, the Cloud Changes Everything!

For me, the big question is, what does the migration to Cloud Computing mean for today’s IT organization?  What structural changes are necessary to successfully leverage Cloud Computing capabilities?  How quickly should you be moving IT services to the Cloud?  How does the Cloud impact the IT Service Portfolio and the capabilities needed to deliver those services?  What are the implications for IT competencies?  How does business-IT governance change in a Cloud Computing world?

I think these are important questions whose answers are not yet totally clear.  As I reflect back on the shift from mainframe to client-server computing, many IT organizations were less than stellar at anticipating needed changes.  As a result, they experienced more bumps and potholes in that journey than was necessary.  For example, for all that had been learned about back-up and recovery in a mainframe world, the onset of client-server computing created gaping holes in the IT organization’s ability to cope with data protection and loss at the Personal Computer level.  The same was true for the evolution from client-server to the web – many of the controls put in place for client-server computing were ineffective (and some even counter-productive) as more work moved to the Internet.

Which Aspects of Cloud Computing Could Bite Your IT Organization?

In the next few posts I will explore some of IT organizational implications of Cloud Computing.  Aspects we will examine will include:

• Mobility implications – both for the business user and the IT professional charged with enabling that user.
• The distinctions between Infrastructure as a Service, Applications as a Service, Platform as a Service, Development as a Service and Business Process Services and how these impact IT organizations.
• The distinctions between Public, Private and Community Clouds and their implications for IT.
• Accounting implications, including funding and budgeting.
• Implications for Business-IT Governance.
• Security and Privacy.
• Implications for the work teams and flow of work involved in requirements analysis to solutioning.
• Impact on Enterprise Architecture.
• Implications for IT Services and Service Management.

Please weigh in – let us know your experiences, issues and concerns about the shift to the Cloud.  Do you agree with my assessment that this shift is inevitable?  How fast do you see it happening?  What does it mean for you personally, and for your career?

IT Reality 1.0

Reality 1.0 holds that IT must be managed.  It is difficult and complex – fraught with crucial technical details.  Mastering these details requires teams of technical experts, following rigorous processes and procedures.  Issues that mere mortals don’t often think about – things such as back up and recovery, security and privacy, regulatory compliance, business continuity – must be planned for and managed by IT specialists who have been properly trained and certified in these disciplines.

Reality 1.0 holds that IT should be owned, and certainly, must be controlled internally.  It holds that business users must be protected – both from themselves and from the raft of vendors and consultants, all trying to sell them stuff that could cost them money (at the very least) and might even get them in trouble.

Reality 1.0 holds that qualified IT resources are scarce and costly.  They take time to develop and cannot be ramped up or down quickly.  Therefore, long term planning and concerns about scaling are constantly on the IT professional’s mind.

Reality 1.0 is obsessed with risk avoidance.  Constantly aware of many of the horror stories that are told around the IT campfires (and sometimes involved in either perpetrating or recovering from such horrors), IT leaders work to prevent the many risks associated with IT.

Given resource and risk issues with IT, Reality 1.0 deploys sophisticated tools and governance processes to filter the many opportunities for IT-enablement and weed out all but the key initiatives that justify the the investment and risks.

Reality 1.0 perceives the world of IT as relatively closed and proprietary.  Therefore, it is obsessed with IT architectures and standards – with figuring out how to weave together point solutions into capabilities that meet enterprise needs.

Reality 1.0 is about large projects and solutions – multi-month, sometimes multi-year initiatives designed to last for years.

Reality 1.0 separates the world into ‘development’ and ‘production.’  The move from one to the other is like the move through an airlock – from a dangerous and polluted free-for-all into the safe, secure and sterile data center.

IT Reality 2.0

Reality 2.0, by contrast, holds that IT is simple, ubiquitous and inherently safe.  Almost anyone can be creative and productive with IT – all they need is an Internet connection and a device equipped with a web browser.  If the user knows nothing, they can simply leverage what is already on the web – and learn as they do so.  If they know a little, and are adventurous, they can do much more than passively leverage what is already there – they can “mash up” new capabilities from existing ones to solve new problems.  They can learn as they go, become even more adventurous and creative – perhaps even commercialize what they have created.  Over time they will become even more skilled – creating more sophisticated solutions – or leveraging ‘crowdsourcing‘ to engage others to help them create the solutions they need.

Reality 2.0 does not care about IT ownership or control – they care about results.

Reality 2.0 sees the world as a sea of opportunities and solutions to be tried and exploited.

Reality 2.0 sees IT resources as ubiquitous – found with a click of the mouse, engaged with a few more clicks, and paid only when they’ve delivered.  Resources are paid for as they are needed – no long term commitments or overhead payments to worry about or justify.

Reality 2.0 is about risk management – moving incrementally and organically, managing risks as they are recognized.

Reality 2.0 has no time for bureaucratic processes such as governance committees and cost justification rigmaroles.  It sees any opportunity as worthy of a quick experiment to see if its real – it believes that in the time it takes to create a business case or wait for the next governance committee meeting, the idea can be tested and validated or eliminated – let the proof of the pudding be in the eating, so to speak, not in the political machinations of investment review bodies.

Reality 2.0 perceives the world of IT as essentially open.  Things in its world naturally fit together.  Therefore, things can be built in small incremental steps – evolving in the light of experience and changing needs.  Things can also be built as discrete point solutions – and yet still can be fitted together if need be.

Reality 2.0 is about small projects and solutions – created in days or weeks and designed for just as long as they are effective.

Reality 2.0 sees development and production as living side-by-side in some virtual place in the sky – while I’m working on its creation, it’s in development.  Once it’s working, I declare it ‘production’ and it is so.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times…

If IT Reality 1.0 accurately reflected today’s world – as it did for most of the last 50 years or so – life would be ok for IT leaders.  Both they and their business consumers would understand their respective roles and would work together for the mutual good.  If Reality 2.0 accurately reflected the world – as it might do in the next 50 years or so, life would ok for IT leaders.  While their roles and those of their business consumers would be very different from those typical today, again they’d be on common ground.

The really big challenge today is that the reality today is neither 1.0 or 2.0 – it is in transition.  And in the immortal words of William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”  This ‘uneven distribution’ of IT Realities 1.0 and 2.0 is going to represent both a curse and an opportunity to IT leaders.  For the progressives, it’s a wonderful opportunity to shift IT into overdrive.  For the laggards, I fear that it’s going to make their lives more and more miserable!

Do you live in this dichotomy?  How quickly is reality 1.0 being replaced by reality 2.0?  Are these realities coexisting?  What are you doing to accelerate or impede the shift?

I introduced my ideas about leveraging Web 2.0 (broadly defined) to significantly drive up the value of business innovation – specifically by following the principles and processes of Design Thinking.  I’ve been getting to this point in my last series of posts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)  In fact, those posts were largely written as I was developing my session materials.

Does ‘Design Thinking’ Have Legs?

Part of my thesis built upon the success of the Design Thinking movement that has gelled over the last 5 years.  I have found the success stories compelling, and the underlying principles resonate with my own experiences and values over the last 30 years in trying to leverage IT for increased innovation.  However, I was troubled by the recognition and acceptability of the term ‘Design Thinking’ – especially in the US.  The text of a 2007 speech by BusinessWeek‘s Bruce Nussbaum given in London tipped me off that there might be a problem here.

Nussbaum’s Banana…

In his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art, Nussbaum noted:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana. Peel that banana back and you find great design. Yummy design. . The kind of design that can change business culture and all of our civil society as well.”

One of the first to make the Web 2.0 connection, Nussbaum went on to say:

Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.”

I tested the waters of my Summit attendees, first by asking how many in the room had some familiarity with the term ‘Design Thinking’?   Three hands shot up, and a couple sort of hovered around shoulder level (presumably meaning, “I’ve heard of it, but please don’t call on me to talk about it!”).  Of the three hands, two were from companies for whom I had Design Thinking case studies about and who were listed in my very first slide (I had not at this point turned on the projector.)  The third hand was from a senior executive at a major Industrial Supply company that I had not expected to be particularly Design Thinking literate.  So, test 1 indicated that the term is not widely known.  Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Design Thinking is not widely practiced – perhaps all 60 companies in the room do in fact excel at Design Thinking, but refer to what they do as some variation of Nussbaum’s ‘banana’?  However, I truly doubt this.  In fact, the many one-on-one conversations that I had with the executives at this summit during the reception and dinner following my presentation supported my sense that explicit efforts to drive up the value of business innovation are relatively few and far between.

Are Design Thinkers Web 2.0 Enabled?

To the larger part of my thesis, there was little evidence at this Summit that any form of Web 2.0 was being explicitly leverage to support Design Thinking (or innovation, or the banana!)  There were a few ‘accidental experiments’ and emergent social networks – both internal and external – but nothing claimed as part of a deliberate, holistic effort to increase innovation through Web 2.0 technologies.  This for me was the big surprise.  The Senior Vice President of Strategy from one of the Design Thinking literate companies told me at the reception, “When you first connected Design Thinking and Web 2.0 in your presentation, I thought you’d completely lost it!  But as you gave examples, the light bulbs began to turn on – I think you are onto something!”  This was gratifying indeed – well worth the price of admission!

Graphic courtesy of RI Nexus

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The easiest way to do this for IT people is to think in terms of a process, the steps in that process, and how information technology might enable those steps.

Tim Brown‘s “Three Spaces of Innovation”

A good place to explore the Design Thinking process is in IDEO CEO, Tim Brown’s excellent HBR article from June 2008.  In that paper, Tim presents a model of how Design Thinking happens.  Tim’s model describes “Three Spaces of Innovation” – Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.  What I like about this picture is that it’s not a simple linear process – it is somewhat chaotic, full of little feedback loops and more concerned with how things connect and flow that with a rigid process.

How Web 2.0 Might Enable Innovation Activities

In the figure below I have added simplistic examples of how different types of Web 2.0 capabilities might play into the major activities contained in Tim Brown’s model.  Consider this a simple illustration – there are a zillion possible variations on this theme!

Move Edge Activities to the Cloud

I believe that Cloud Computing in its various forms presents a relatively attractive way to quickly develop Edge capabilities.  Given that Design Thinking requires that we become more comfortable with experimentation, at the very least we should be experimenting with the Cloud, and Edge capabilities present an ideal case for cloud experiments.  We can keep them relatively isolated, implement them very quickly with little to no capital outlay, and everything we do in the cloud is inherently collaborative (e.g., think Google Docs, Google Wave, Mindmeister, etc.) just as just about everything we need to be doing around Design Thinking is inherently collaborative.

A More Traditional Process View

For those that prefer to take a more traditional process view, Wikipedia suggests a simple 7-Step Design Thinking process, rendered as a loop below.  Note, please don’t take this process too literally.  Design Thinking is more about ‘iterate and converge’ than the more typical IT process.  These steps are rarely going to be linear and sequential.

Collaborative Intents for Each Step

A couple of years ago, working on a multi-company research project with my colleague Tammy Erickson at nGenera, we identified 10 distinct types of ‘Collaborative Intents’ to be considered when planning any type of collaboration initiative.  For each collaborative intent, we can be quite explicit about the business outcomes to be achieved.  So, for example, in the Design Thinking step “Define” we are interested in ‘connecting ideas’ that might not typically be connected in order to amplify knowledge and identify innovation opportunities.

Web 2.0 Technologies for Each Step

We can map the types of Collaborative Intent to each step in the Design Thinking process.  In the table above, as an illustration, for each type of Collaborative Intent, I have identified the types of technology that might be useful to enable that intent, and provided some examples of actual technologies in each space.  Please note, mention or lack thereof for any specific technology does not imply any endorsement (or lack thereof!)

Does this make sense to you?  Do you have experience in applying Web 2.0 to Design Thinking?  Please weigh in – let’s generate some dialog on these ideas and their reality in practice.

Image courtesy of Red Jotter

In my next post I will  drill down and suggest ways to use Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to increase innovativeness and business success, but for now I want to examine the Core/Edge distinction in order to focus us clearly on Edge capabilities, where innovation tends to surface – without being encumbered by the Core.

“Core” and “Edge” Capabilities

Identifying the best ways to leverage collaborative technologies for innovation require an appreciation of the distinction between “Core” and “Edge” business capabilities.  The notions of “Core” and “Edge” I think were first articulated in June 2005 by John Hagel III, a former McKinsey consultant, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox in a Wharton Summary interview titled “Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?“  In that interview, Hagel noted:

The… edge… has to do with the notion of competitive advantage, but it also has to do with the view that the ability to develop capabilities involves operating at the edge. Of course, “edge” has multiple meanings as well. It means the edge of the enterprise, the edge of business processes, geographic edges in terms of emerging economies, demographic edges in terms of younger generations coming in with different mindsets – it’s a whole set of edges that create the opportunity for accelerating capability building.”

Seely Brown noted in the same interview:

… being able to listen deeply and participate on the edge, you can pick up things before anybody else picks them up, and you can use that to accelerate your own capability building… This puts a new spin on why distributed collaboration around the world might be critical in creating this sustainable edge.”

My colleagues and I picked up this theme in our multi-company research at nGenera and I covered it in some depth starting in March 2008 with my “Surfing and IT Innovation” post, followed in July 2008 with my “Edginess and IT Innovation” post.

The reason this Core/Edge distinction is so important for IT professionals in the corporate environment is that the Core exerts enormous gravitational pull – innovation activities such as business experiments at the edge tend to get pulled into the core where standards and rigid processes rule.  The Core typically consumes 70% to 90% of IT resources, starving edge activities of the resources and focus they need to flourish.

Requirements of Core Capabilities

Core Capabilities exist to support exploitation of existing business opportunities.  As such they tend to be ‘locked down’, complex and hard to change – in fact, they are designed to prevent ‘bad change.’  Core processes are intended to be highly stable and predictable, typically built on proprietary and relatively fixed architectures.

Requirements of Edge Capabilities

By contrast, Edge Capabilities exist to stimulate and support the exploration of new business opportunities. As such they must be open, agile, transparent and adaptive.  While Core capabilities must ‘prevent bad change’, Edge capabilities are designed to stimulate ‘good change.’  They leverage open, emergent architecture and open sourcing. This, of course, is the realm of Web 2.0 – social media, open source, open innovation, cloud computing, etc.

Balancing Core and Edge Capabilities

The table below further highlights the differences between Core and Edge capabilities and shows example of each type.  My point here is that most IT organizations have many years of experience in perfecting Core capabilities but have relatively little experience with Edge capabilities.  The IT leaders’ natural preference is to control rather than facilitate, to direct rather than stimulate.

In Part 3 of this series, we will look at a generic Design Thinking process and see how each step can be enabled by Web 2.0 “Edge” capabilities.

Image courtesy of Larval Subjects

So, What’s an IT Operating Model?

eHow, in their very simplified discussion on how to develop a business operating model state that an operating model is:

the basic framework that your company follows to get your products into the hands of consumers”

If we translate this to the IT space, we could say that “an IT operating model is the basic framework your IT organization follows to get your products and services into the hands of its consumers and customers.”

Why Does Enterprise 2.0 Demand a New IT Operating Model?

This is a question I get from time to time, and I think there are at least three key answers:

1. The types of IT products and services the IT organization must deliver in an Enterprise 2.0 world are quite different from those in a 1.0 world.  Enablement of enterprise collaboration, for example.
2. The ways that IT products and services can be delivered in an Enterprise 2.0 world are also quite different.  Through “the cloud”, for example.
3. The ways of designing and executing an IT Operating Model in a Web 2.0 context are also quite different.  Collaboratively, and through “the cloud”, for example.

I’m actually most excited about point 3. above.  It’s something I’ve been exploring, both through multi-company research and through actual consulting engagements, and can now state unequivocally that Web 2.0 provides an incredibly powerful context through which to design and actualize an IT Operating Model.  But in the next few posts, I’m going to explore each of the three questions.  And, in the interests of collaboration, let me ask a question…

How are you using Web 2.0 approaches to change your IT Operating Model?

Image courtesy of FredCavazza.net

Something Old, Something New

A couple of things struck me about this data.  First, I don’t know what the survey methodology was or the demographics behind it, but there’s not much of a spread between these “top 10 issues that technology decision makers are researching now.”  Also, I wonder how CIO Magazine differentiates between Collaboration Tools and Wikis, blogs, social networking?  Furthermore, I suspect that if statistical significance/margin of error were calculated, the data may have little meaning.  However, giving CIO Magazine the benefit of the statistical doubt, I am stuck by the fact that some of these issues have been around for 15 years or more.

I wonder, is it that business intelligence, business process management, enterprise architecture and content/document management are changing so much in 2009 that they’ve made it into the top ten technology research issues?  Or is it that IT leaders still have not made much real progress on these perennial challenges?  I suspect the latter.  I think there are just certain issues that IT leaders wrestle with that are always just on the periphery of their “big three” initiatives, and as such, never get wrestled to the ground.

Enterprise Architecture – Now You See It; Now You Don’t!

For example, most IT organizations I know are on their 3rd or 4th attempt to crack the Enterprise Architecture nut.  They’ve dabbled in this with a couple of people in the Chief Architect role that were subsequently reassigned, then formed large groups focused on this, but disbanded them after too much time with too little results, then reformed them as dispersed networks, and watched helplessly as these languished and eventually faded away.

Business Intelligence – Here We Go Again

Similarly for business intelligence (and associated data warehousing and related efforts).  Note also the connection between Enterprise Architecture and Business Intelligence – if you cannot crack the EA nut, you probably won’t get far with BI!

Content/Document Management – Why Can’t I “Google It”?

Ditto for Content/Document Management.  While Google manages to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, IT professionals have a hard time helping their business users find an internal document that was created yesterday!  And note again the connection with the EA conundrum!

Business Process Management – What Happened?

This is the perennial issue I just don’t get.  In the 90′s everyone was reengineering business processes.  How come we no longer know how to do it?  Was it that the work was largely “outsourced” to management consultants, and IT organizations never learned how to do business process management?  I personally believe this is a major factor.  Just as many shops effectively outsourced their Enterprise Architectures to SAP and Oracle (See my old post on Did You Accidentally Outsource Your Enterprise Architecture)  so did they outsource their BPM efforts to Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and so on.

It will be interesting to look at CIO Magazine’s data on this 5 years from now!

Mastering 3 Fundamentally Different Value Propositions

IT Organizations have to deliver day-in, day-out on three very different value propositions:

• Operational excellence for IT infrastructure.
• Customer intimacy for leveraging business unit IT.
• Product leadership/innovation for exploiting business opportunities and new operating models made possible through emerging technologies.

Leaders of IT organizations are under a punishing spotlight – the costs seem to continually increase, and the value is often hard to see.  60% – 70% of most IT organization’s activities are only visible when something goes wrong.  Much of the time, IT work is invisible.  The underlying technologies are all evolving rapidly, as are the business models through which technology is being delivered, including in-house managed, outsourced, off-shored, Software as a Service and Cloud Computing.

Increasingly, everybody thinks they know more about IT than their IT organization, and wonder why a PC that costs $400 in the local Best Buy and works right out of the box, costs $4,000 at work and usually does not work without the intervention of the Helpdesk!

Fuzzy Organizational Boundaries

As if those complexities were not enough, the boundaries between the work of the IT organization and the businesses it serves are both blurring and shifting.  What used to be the “official source” of all things related to IT is now just one of many sources – including self service, the computer jockey who hangs out in the mail room, the Geek Squad (from the Best Buy that just sold me that $400 PC!) and the World Wide Web – from which I can get free software by the bucketful, cheap hardware, and enough willing support and development resources to tackle just about anything!

And, to make matters worse, many IT organizations are falling behind in terms of what they make generally available and possible for their business partners compared with the state of the art.  It seems that people can accomplish just about anything via the Internet.  However, for many of them, they have to go home to do it!  When in the office, some of the more important and potentially innovative things people want to do are blocked.  Whereas the IT organization’s vision might say something about “enabling the business”, much of the time it feels more like a barrier.

Trying to Control the Uncontrollable

It is not surprising that the natural instinct of any IT leader is to try to control the chaos.  However, I believe that lens of complexity theory provides insights into more productive and less painful ways of controlling the environment than the draconian measures traditionally employed.  In particular, I believe that approaching IT organizations as the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) they have indeed become will prove to be a more effective  paradigm for organizing and managing IT capabilities – creating a new order out of the chaos, if you will.

A CAS is a special cases of complex system.  As Wikipedia notes,

They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience.  Examples of CAS include ant colonies, the biosphere and the ecosystem, the brain and the immune system, the cell and the developing embryo, manufacturing businesses and any human social group-based endeavor in a cultural and social system such as political parties or communities. This includes some large-scale on-line systems, such as collaborative tagging or social bookmarking systems.

Features of complex systems

Complex systems have boundaries that are hard to determine, just like IT organizations.  They exhibit “memory” in that prior states may have an influence on present states.  This effect can sometimes be seen as an organization’s tendency to return to its current patterns of behavior, even when disturbed by an intervention such as a reorganization.  CAS exhibit “emergent” behaviors – behaviors that emerge from a complex interaction between CAS components, and can be impossible to predict.  For example, social networks around a particular topic or issue can emerge without any specific effort to create such a network, while attempts to foster a given community quickly might fade away.  Relationships in CAS are non-linear – a small force can have a large impact, and vice-versa – often called the “butterfly effect.”

This CAS lens presents a far more accurate perspective on IT organizational behavior than does the deterministic view that has dominated IT organizational design for the past 50 years or so.  In today’s emerging Web 2.0 world (and beyond) we need to manage IT as an organic capability, rather than through functional organization designs with their “lines and boxes”.

To be continued…

In subsequent posts, we will discuss the implications of considering the IT organization through the lens of Complex Adaptive Systems, and see what new organizational constructs might be more appropriate for a Web 2.0 world.  Please join me on this intriguing journey – tell us how you are seeing the lessons from nature and complex adaptive systems apply to IT management.

Most of my consulting clients have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft in general, and Windows in particular.  Microsoft takes an increasingly significant bite out of the IT budget, and the cost of resources needed to keep PC‘s running and secure is a substantial burden on enterprise IT organizations – one they they get little to no credit for.  (As I’ve noted before, IT infrastructure activities such as keeping PC’s running are only visible when they fail!)

Overshooting User Requirements

Clayton Christensen, in his classic book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” points out that over time, through a successive series of minor innovations, products tend to overshoot a their performance needs beyond which the typical user can absorb.  (How much of Windows do you really need and use?  How many features of MS Office go unused by all but the hardiest of users?)  This overshooting of product capabilities leaves great openings for new market entrants to come in well below current performance thresholds with products that fully meet the needs of the typical user, without the encumbrances of the bells and whistles – often derisively referred to as “bloatware.”  That is the play being made successfully today with Netbooks.  That is also the play, I believe, Google made previously with Google Apps, and is now making with Chrome OS.  But in the latter case, its not just a stripped down OS (with the speed and simplicity benefits that brings), but an OS designed from the outset for a Web-based universe.

Inevitably, not everyone believes Chrome OS will be a slam dunk for Google.  (See for example, David Coursey’s Tech Inciter blog at PC World – Five Reasons Google Chrome OS Will Fail.)  I personally don’t buy David’s arguments – they mostly seem to be relative to today’s marketplace.   I believe the enterprise market will be more than ready for such an innovation by the time it really hits the marketplace, and that Google Chrome OS represents the first real threat to Microsoft hegemony over the desktop.  It’s also interesting to note that in the same week Google made this announcement, they also removed the “beta” designation from Google Mail (a beta that was 5 years in the making!)

What do you think?  Are you likely to switch from Windows if Chrome OS delivers against its promises?