One of the many things that has the Big Guys excited about Web 2.0 is the ease and speed with which new productivity-enhancing applications can be developed and customized with off-the-shelf components.  Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, unveiled at a trade show a prototype "IBM Enterprise Mashup" based on Web services and wiki technologies that allows users to create a customized application in less than five minutes. 

"The embrace of open standards and Web 2.0 technologies is forcing businesses to rethink the paradigm of the proprietary, one-size-fits-all productivity application," declared Smith. "In today's business climate, with business collaborations quickly forming and disbanding, customers are rethinking how they can enable innovation to occur.

"Customers I talk to are abuzz about Web 2.0 and the creation of popular Internet services that seem to quickly appear out of nowhere, becoming instant global phenomena that are enjoyed by the masses — including their employees. They want to apply that new paradigm to make their businesses act faster and grab new opportunities. There's no going back."