The absolute highlight of last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was meeting in person and online many very bright people including Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Susan Scrupski, Michael Krigsman and many others. There’s certainly a strong discourse here about advancing the agenda for Enterprise computing.

As with many advanced topics in Enterprise computing, it’s very easy to take a potshot: as we all know:

* SOA is Dead (Anne Thomas Manes)
* Enterprise 2.0 what a Crock (Dennis Howlett) and
* Cloud is Water Vapor (Larry Ellison)

One link that got me to thinking was posted by Nenshad–Tomio Geron from the Wall Street Journal blogged about the vast number of venture backed startups that have failed this year.

Pundits aside, I think there is a very easy “Crock Test” that can definitively answer Dennis Howlett’s question. The question wont be answered by a failed panel discussion. No matter how pithy, it wont be answered by a blog post. The closest thing to the “Crock Test” came from Susan Scrupski’s “last and only response to crock-gate”, a list of organizations involved in the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council. The problem with the list is that the names are just names–you kind of want to be able to click on them to see the case studies, if any.

Which brings me to the “Crock Test”. Unfortunately, the test will require some degree of patience. We will definitively know if Enterprise 2.0 is a crock if in 20, 30 or 40 years we can look back on all of the Enterprise 2.0 legacy software that has been created.

As I mentioned in 5 definitions towards the maturing of Enterprise 2.0, legacy is another word for the software projects that worked. So here’s hoping we will be looking back at Susan’s list of companies and seeing a list of case studies about the depth and scope of transformation and a list of the huge successful companies built on top of Enterprise 2.0–not a list of failed ones.

To be fair, the failed companies on the list come from a large number of sectors–it’s just a sobering list, not a condemnation of #e20

My 2 cents,
Miko