Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand today, you can’t have failed to hear that Google has announced a new project to develop the Google Chrome Operating System.

Google came pretty late to the browser party - too late in fact. So targeting the operating system itself makes perfect sense. Some say it’s a direct threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop. That may turn out to be true, although I’d strongly advise Microsoft to acquire eyeOS or one of the many Web OS vendors.

What I find most interesting however, given Google’s forays into the enterprise social software space, is whether GCOS has the potential to be the first serious attempt at an Enterprise 2.0 operating system. It has everything going for it: open source; lightweight; speed; simplicity; security. Not to mention the fact that it will run any web-based application, and therefore any web-based social software application.

I fully expect to see the whole suite of Google Enterprise applications being pushed heavily through GCOS.

What do you think: will GCOS be the answer to all your Enterprise 2.0 prayers?

This is a complete electronic replica of the printed book in PDF format. None of that anti-social DRM involved - in this hyper-social age I hope I can trust people to respect my copyright.

To buy, you can go directly to: http://bit.ly/enterprise20
For more information, go here: http://bit.ly/enterprise20info

The way it works is simple: any employee can sign up to Yammer for free. If they are the first to use their corporate email domain (e.g. acme.com) then they automatically create a private micro-blogging community for their organization. Any subsequent employee who signs up with the same email domain becomes a member of that private community. In fact, they disguise an “invite a colleague” recruitment feature by asking new users to provide the email addresses of people they work with (including their manager).

Even if 10,000 employees sign up, it doesn’t cost a cent. The desire for low-cost social computing from normal employees has been met. It’s a smart move on Yammer’s part, as these employees are unlikely to have the budgets required to pay for the service.

Obviously Yammer isn’t going to get rich doing this. So they’ve come up with a cunning ruse to open the corporate coffers. They’ve worked out the one thing that companies discovering these “unauthorised” communities will pay for: control and ownership. So all the security features (like IP restrictions, password complexity and session management) are “paid for” features that cost the company $1 per user per month. At this point the employer also owns all the updates posted by employees to Yammer. Effectively Yammer is holding employers to ransom: “Your employees are using our system, and we want $1 a month per user to give you control and ownership of the space.”

And that’s why their business model has to change.

Firstly, I doubt that a company with 1,000 employees on Yammer - let alone 10,000 - is going to pay $1 per user a month for this service. Sooner or later Yammer is going to have to introduce volume-based pricing and/or a behind-the-firewall version of Yammer for a one-off fee.

Secondly, the majority of those employees who sign up for Yammer do so out of curiosity or because they’ve received one of the cunningly disguised invitations. Yet the employer still has to pay $1 a month for every member, not just the active ones. I’d like to see Yammer charging based on “active” usage, not total membership.

Thirdly, once they do start paying, the Yammer business model actually discourages companies from encouraging adoption. Let’s say there are 30 members of a Yammer community when the company takes control - that’s $30 a month. It’s in the company’s financial interests to limit the rate of further adoption. If numbers rose to 1,000 say, a hike of $30 to $1,000 would take a lot of explaining to most bean-counters. It will inevitably lead to internal cross-charging for most companies, which will further limit adoption and value. Yammer needs to let companies to put a limit on the number of users in order to limit their monthly budgets.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Yammer and I congratulate them on a very clever business model. But they need to be very careful not to bite the only hand that feeds them.

I’ve been asked if I know anyone interested in buying a majority stake in a growth-stage Enterprise 2.0 company - would probably appeal to an existing software company looking to expand their product suite or get a foothold in Europe.

Ping me a private note at niall@tiggi.com if you want to know more.

In response to numerous requests, I put my slide deck on Slideshare.net. Here they are:

I’m afraid they lose a little without my talking over them. If you’d like me to come explain them to your company, please contact me.

Seems like a bit of an untapped market to be honest*, but one that hits all the buttons is Nosco (www.nosco.dk) from a Danish firm.

Not only does it allow voting and commenting, but it also allows participants to buy and sell shares in the best ideas and run competitions. For sales teams, I think these kinds of features could be ideal. The software can be hosted securely externally (so up and running quickly) or installed on a customer’s own servers.

* Since posting this, Noam Danon left a comment pointing me to QMarkets, another potential candidate. Any more out there I’m missing?

** Add Consensus Point to your list as well. President David Perry informs me that they “actually started developing prediction markets 15 years ago but things *really* started heating up with The Wisdom of Crowds came out.”

In what promises to be a whirlwind tour I’ll be speaking to Hill & Knowlton clients and staff in Toronto on Tuesday 7th, followed by beers at Third Tuesday that same evening. On Wednesday I fly to Ottawa and do the same thing all over again, with Third Tuesday in Ottawa on a Wednesday (these Canucks are crazy guys, aren’t they).

It’s a while since I was last in Canada, but seeing that both the literature review and foreword authors for Enterprise 2.0 are both based there, it seems like a fitting place to begin the tour.

The rest of the year currently sees the roadshow moving on to Paris and Finland in November, and Sweden in December.

Promises to be a busy end to 2008.

If this is an area of interest to you (and it probably should be), then I strongly recommend you read two posts from Jeremiah Owyang and Neville Hobson.

In List of enterprise microblogging tools: Twitter for the intranet, Jeremiah has started a list of vendor offerings in the area (currently standing at eight). Well worth watching I think.

Neville takes one of the offerings, Yammer, for a test drive in Twitter for the enterprise from Yammer.

Like blogs, wikis and other social software that has gone before, I advise caution. Make sure you know what you want from such tools (and also what you need in terms of security and control) before diving straight in.

Daniel’s review is practical and down to earth, a point made clear from the title “Web 2.0 made simple”. He highlights both the Oracle and Janssen-Cilag case studies that feature in the book as examples that “make a very compelling argument for Enterprise 2.0.”

He also singles out the 4Cs Approach that runs through the book, labeling it as “a practical action-led guide to employing social software within organisations.”

I was particularly interested to see Daniel picking up on the increasing friction between business and IT departments that will result as companies try to introduce these tools:

As a result, an initiative often falls over when it gets to the IT department, who are more concerned with maintaining current infrastructure than experimenting with new unproven technologies. This is one of the major challenges of widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.

He concludes that the book is “a great way to educate people new to the subject while enabling those who are already experienced in the area” and “shows how easy it can (and should) be to start experimenting with Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace.”

Who am I to argue with that?

First up is a review from Roy Johnson, who maintains the excellent Mantex website which is full of excellent resources.

He summarises the book well, explaining that its purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 application can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in secretive, competitive businesses. He comments that to succeed in modern business, managers and directors “must learn to listen and talk to their customers and staff”, be “more agile in their thinking”, “less monolithic in their practices”, and “catch up to new Internet-based activities which can sweep away unwary traditionalists overnight”.

There is one criticism though:

In fact he misses the opportunity to point out that one of the biggest incentives for companies to embrace Web 2.0 software is that much of it is completely free. Almost all major programs are now available in Open Source versions - including such fundamentals as operating systems (Linux) content management systems (Joomla) and virtual learning environments (Moodle).

In the UK, government institutions have invested and wasted billions of pounds after being bamboozled by software vendors. In the education sector alone, VLEs such as Blackboard and WebCT have proved costly mistakes for many colleges and universities. They are now locked in to proprietory systems, whilst OSS programs such as Moodle run rings round them - and are free.

It’s a good point well made. I certainly wasn’t explicit about this. I tend to find that the fact that software is open source or free (which aren’t the same thing) doesn’t make it good. It’s certainly not one of the criteria for success. Sure, it can be an incentive, but my guess is that most businesses would prefer well supported, paid for software that will meet their needs than open source, free software that might not.

Summing up, Roy says:

This is a truly inspirational book which should be required reading for managers, IT leaders, systems analysts, developers, and business strategists in any enterprise, small, medium, and especially large.

I encourage you to read his full review to draw your own conclusions.