The always provocative Susan Scrupski has taken issue with Andrew McAfee’s assertion that Enterprise 2.0 is more of a transformation than a revolution: 

Yes, we’re transforming the enterprise with new alternatives, but there is an undercurrent of shall-I-say… Raging against the Machine… that is driving the move to self-help applications. I’ve been harping on the socio-cultural underpinnings on the “movement” and the freedom of choice that web 2.0 applications provide to users for months now. For whatever their reason (I hate Outlook, Excel, SAP, Oracle, fillintheblank for xxx reason), users are turned off by the establishment’s choices and are psychologically primed to look at alternatives. That smacks of revolution– not transformation.

My position is that it depends on what you mean by “revolution” but I mostly agree with Susan.  Let me explain.

In 1974, a man named Robert Pirsig published a famous self-discovery book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance.  It was one of those books that is more fun to carry around and quote than to actually read, but I have always remembered one key premise:  motorcyle lovers can be divided into two camps–classical thinkers, who care most about how the machines work and derive their pleasure from tinkering with them and romantic thinkers, who get their joy from the experience of riding them and don’t much care how they work. 

The meaning of a motorcyle depends entirely on the perspective each individual brings to it.

The beauty of this conceit is that you can apply it to anything.  For example:  social software advocates can be divided into two camps–classical thinkers, who care most about how the software works and derive their pleasure from tinkering with it and romantic thinkers, who get their joy from the experience of using it and don’t much care how it work.

To software engineers, who are generally classical thinkers, E2.0 or social software is not all that revolutionary.  It is the natural evolution of Lotus Notes and groupware in general and its acceptance by large enterprises will be slow and painful–but more an insurgency than a civil war, to use a Rumsfeldian distinction.

To us romantics, social software is not much about software at all but about a cultural revolution in which individuals are demanding that they get to choose how they connect with other people and when.  Wireless phones and IMs are a bigger part the revolution than blogs and wikis.  

Social software tools are a response to a growing demand for personal, rather than group or corporate, control of one’s life.  They allow the merging of work and play into a new and different form of lifestyle in which the distinctions between work hours and off hours are disappearing. 

I call these tools ”MeMedia” because many of them was developed by, and for, the most privileged and over-parented generation in history–the children of late boomers.  MeMedia puts each person at the center of their own mini-universe of friends and businesss contacts, often to the exclusion of others. 

The cultural implications of Enterprise 2.0 are at least as important as the technological implications–perhaps more so–and there is an epic management battle brewing between the forces of control and the advocates of messy, but potentially more rewarding, democracy.  That’s where the revolution really is.