Overheard: The SAPanese take Web 2.0 seriously

“Surely SAP is a big, boring enterprise software company, about as far from the furious consumer innovation of Web 2.0 as you can imagine. Yet it’s been clear to me for years that SAP takes the ideas of Web 2.0 very seriously.” Tim O’Reilly, SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?

Tim writes: By my definition, a web 2.0 company is one that uses internet-fueled network effects to build services that get better as a direct result of user interaction. Figuring out all the clever different ways to do this is the heart of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 started out as the name of a conference! And that name had a very specific purpose: to signify that the web was roaring back after the dot com bust! The 2.0 bit wasn’t about the technology, but about the resurgence of interest in the web. When we came up with the idea back in 2003, a lot of programmers were out of work, and there was a general lack of interest in web applications. But we saw a resurgence coming, and designed a conference to tell the story of what was going to be different this time.