The Kindle Fire's reasonable price, together with the potential of widespread Android app support, makes the device an enticing option, especially for families who want to give a tablet to the kids without having to blast through five bills. The Kindle Fire is clearly first and foremost an entertainment-consumption companion to Amazon's services. The ability to install apps and do anything more with the tablet--handling email, sharing photos, and the like--really feels like a secondary operation. At that point it makes me wonder whether the Kindle Fire is truly a “tablet” or just a content-playback machine with some extra smarts.

In many ways, the Kindle Fire isn't trying to beat the iPad or the Android-tablet masses at their own game. The Kindle Fire is doing its own thing, and going after a totally different audience.

Amazon's refreshed Kindle e-reader product line has definitely caught my eye this week. In particular, despite its possible limitations, the new Andriod-based full colour Fire (but sans e-ink) "reader" looks like it really could shake up the overall tablet market. I have a family who love to read and its certainly feasible to imagine kitting the family out with the lower priced Kindles (we already have one). Unfortunately, the Fire at this stage will be available from November but only in the US.

Incidentally, there have been a lot of comments that the Fire looks like RIM's Playbook - apparently its because Amazon enlisted the assistance of the same manufacturer. A few people have also raised concerned about Amazon's Silk Browser, but I can't really see any difference (in terms of privacy risk) from other caching, social networking and other proxy services that already exist. If you don't like the Amazon Web Services (AWS) based acceleration feature, just switch it off or buy a different device :-)

The much anticipated Socialtext 5 has been released - see this announcement post from Sarah:

This release sees a complete overhaul of the user interface, introduces a world-class rich text editor and a barrel-load of other features that make Socialtext more accessible, social and successful than ever before.

I have to say, the refreshed out of the box UI looks great!

Watch the videos. Then read my post over on the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.

There is a lot to like in Confluence 4.0's new content editor. What I particularly like is that they haven't just improved the usability for everyday users, they have also made it even easier for those same users to utilise one of Confluence's key strengths, macros.

This infoposter highlights well why traditional intranets fail, but I'm just not so sure those top five ideas for enhancing them will actually fix the problem. Actually, Socialcast might have missed the chance to explain why we need to humanise intranets and make them an integral part of how people organise and get work done.

E2.0 tools today are typically not integrated with the rest of a company’s applications. So the unstructured / emergent / social work happens in a totally different digital environment than the structured / pre-defined / formal work. Orders get filled using the ERP system, while conversations about why the order’s not getting filled happen in email, IM, a wiki, and so on.

For some purposes, this is OK. Narrating your work via blogs or microblogs so that others can find you and access your expertise is a great standalone use case, as is narrating your ignorance —   asking questions to the enterprise as a whole without guessing in advance who will know the answer.

But most informal collaboration, I bet, happens ‘close to’ the formal work of the enterprise. So the digital environments that support the formal and informal work should also be very close to each other, either within the same application or across tightly integrated ones. Data and decisions (“OK, go ahead and increase the customer’s credit limit so we can ship the order”) should be able to flow easily between the systems for formal and informal work. This is not a new point, but it bears repeating for exactly the reasons Laurie mentions. Unless and until this happens, E2.0 is much less than it could be.

Yes, its easy to drink too much social 'Kool Aid'. But that applies as much to the process centric view, as it does to focusing only on the "social, humane, people-centric" perspective.

My point about the impact of electricity on industry still stands. Hard nosed contextual collaboration built around a bad or inefficient business process is only stop-gap measure (if even that), but is probably easier to sell in the short-term. This kind of digital Taylorism is bad not because it ignores the soft stuff, but because the pseudo-science of scientific management was debunked a long time ago.

Part of the problem is that we still get confused by the differences between ideas such as user-driven computing, lightweight enterprise IT approaches, creating good user experience in enterprise apps and social software. Each offers benefits and there is a strong relationship between these four, but they aren't mutually inclusive all of the time.

For example, improving a process might not be so much about contextual collaboration but could simply be about applying lighter Web inspired IT solutions to enterprise problems. I remember seeing this example of a shipping company having a bottom line impact with Enterprise RSS back in 2008.

Just thinking of my last post...

BTW For a more considered response to Saleforce's vision, see Dion's post and also JP Rangaswami.

Hat tip to Susan.

It seemed that my keynote talk at KM Singapore helped to change some people’s thinking about intranets. Challenging the notion that they are old, dull sites containing policies, I generated new enthusiasm for what intranets can (and should) do. But the most controversy came during the question-and-answer session, where I found myself saying:

“Blogs and wikis are dead.”

I certainly understand James' sentiment here. I'm also sure some intranet managers will draw a sigh of relief when they read this, thinking they don't need to worry about this social stuff anymore. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, if we look at James' presentation it is full of refined examples of the software patterns that we call wikis and blogs... including REA Group (Jive), IDEO (ThoughtFarmer) and also Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (which integrates Atlassian Confluence along with a number of other platforms). I'm reminded that wiki is both a verb and a noun.

BTW I'm not aware of any leading enterprise 'wiki' that doesn't provide a rich text editor - even Atlassian are ditching wiki markup entirely in their upcoming version of Confluence.