Wow - some great comments on my last post. Rather than keep the discussion in comments I thought I'd post it up in the main area.
Brian Magierski generally agrees with me and points out SocialText and JotSpot being the exceptions.
Roy Kim makes the point that most enterprise apps and consumer apps are two totally different worlds. He goes on to say that there are several factors that go on to make it much more difficult for a company to develop a product with a short cycle and release. He also goes on to make a provocative statement - that just because we don't see the projects on TechCrunch doesn't mean they're not there.
Pete Cashmore makes a similar point to Roy that most blog readers are users and so want news about things they use.
I agree wtih Roy and Pete that enterprises are much slower to adopt new technologies but if you look back in the hey day of enterprise software back in 1998 and 1999, enterprise companies were the hot thing. You had companies like WebMethods etc. coming out of the woodwork. Why aren't we hearing about those kinds of companies now? I don't believe that it's just because Enterprise adoption is slower. It was slower back in 98-99 as well.
Could it true that most Enterprise Web 2.0 projects simply aren't being blogged about but that they're really out there?
One way to figure this out is to see who the VCs are funding. My experience in talking to them about Aggregate Knowledge is that they are actively looking at a lot of consumer startups as you'd expect they would be. It's not clear to me if they are actively not looking for enterprise deals or if maybe they aren't being approached by enterprise startups because consumer sites are "in".
Are entrepreneurs doing consumer sites now becuase it's easier to raise the money for that?
I'll be talking with a bunch more VCs over the next few weeks so I'll report back with what I find.
