Okay, so you think Ajax is a sink cleaner and a mashup is the freeway fender bender that made you late for work this morning.  Your eyes glaze over when you scan the latest heavy-breathing geek porn at web sites like Scripting News or Slashdot.  Everything you know about social networking you learned from typing “babe” in the MySpace search box.

But, let’s get real. How much of this Web 2.0 stuff do operational managers and workers—people in finance and accounting, HR, marketing and so on—need to know or even understand?   The answer, at this early stage, is probably not a lot.  Big companies today are cloistered in gated communities and they like it that way.  They view the web as a great place to visit and sell products and services but you wouldn’t want to have your enterprise applications live there.  At least, not yet, until you’re absolutely certain that it’s as safe and reliable as your IT infrastructure behind the firewall.  For now, the still-unsolved problems of  security, reliability, transaction integrity, scalability and performance preclude any large-scale movement of strategic enterprise applications to the web.

All that will change over time.  The Internet simply offers too many competitive advantages–global reach, round-the-clock access, richer applications with deeper, real-time features and lower application development and IT infrastructure costs–to be ignored.  Serious, grown-up open source web development companies like Nexaweb and OpenLaszlo and many others are hard at work, sprucing up the neighborhood, setting standards, and fixing the potholes. 

Ironically, the Internet grassroots movement to preserve so-called “net neutrality” may hinder the development of the enterprise web because if it is  successful infrastructure providers will have no financial incentive to develop and offer the enhanced levels of security and reliability that large companies require, which means they will invest less in infrastructure.  Ultimately, that is a bad thing for everybody.

The first companies to benefit from Web 2.0 are the web natives, companies built from the ground up to perform functions that leverage the huge web marketplace and its real-time immediacy and e-commerce capabilities.  Traditional enterprises will get there but not that much and not that soon.  The old saying about a leader being the guy out front on the horse with the arrow in his chest still holds true

So, cheer up, Mr. or Ms. Tech-Challenged.  Play with your Excel spreadsheet and waste an hour trying to find a missing e-mail by searching with the Outlook “find” function.  But, if you really want know what the revolution is about,  sneak a copy of Google’s free Desktop Search on to your machine when your resident geek isn’t looking, type in a couple of words that you remember from the missing e-mail, and see how startling fast it appears on your screen.  That’s what all the cool kids at Microsoft do these days.