Quite a mindwarp to go from the Open Source Business Conference to be exposed to industries with top-down enterprise applications and DRM models of monetization. Wonderful to hear praise from a content buyer at Pfizer for Open Access, Factiva is in beta with RSS and a desire for content licenses that let enterprise users freely remix and share. Bizzare how some XML gurus can’t wrap their heads around the beautiful mess of social software or even fully grok last year’s lessons of blogs undermining CMSs.

There are real needs for the boring stuff like directory, monitoring, backup and storage to fulfill the promise of collaboration at scale. There are real data integrity issues for adding structure in erstwhile unstructured enterprise apps. There enterprises beginning to see their problems as opportunities for innovation. I’m starting to feel like an old guy with an ever-evolving product that has been in the market for two years now. Many still need to hear the basics (ppt), but the conversation quickly leads to real issues and an interest in driving adoption. We, not just my company, are starting to shake up the enterprise market for good.

The Content Industry has the familiar refrain of those that avoid commoditization. In absence of business-level standardization (contracts) the market is flocking to the free (where you need no contract, and people are happy to produce). Technology providers seem to focus on managing complexity at cost, without seeing the importance of practices and the willingness of users to play a role when it’s made simple. Both of these issues center on trust, but spillover has yet to occur aside from some key early standards work. Meanwhile simpler and empowering alternatives are arising from the bottom-up.