"Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg"

Interesting article from Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff about why Enterprise Social media software is so cr*p. The headline we used - "Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg" - is a quote and says it all really, but he makes some other points:

We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

We actually did quite a bit of work on the benefits of real time services in business about 2 years ago, and the issue is this - most businesses do not operate in true real time, and in fact most of the software back-end infrastructure works quickly enough most of the time - but the presentation layers to the users are just cr*p compared to modern consumer software.

But this is due to a different dynamic - when you are giving away free services to users, the User Experience is absolutely critical to takeup - which is why consumer Web 2.0 companies obsess about this. Enterprise software economics are based on getting through client ticklists, and user delight is seldom a criteria for this.

So - when user delight becomes a key differentiator in company software selection, Lotus Notes will finally be thrown out.