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In an earlier post I discussed some of the striking similarities between ephemeral work groups such as I found in New Orleans following Katrina, and the ad hoc teams of independent professionals found here in Seattle here. Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was discussing converting his business web site entirely to open sourced technologies. Why, I asked? He said “to make it easier to collaborate with others”. Once again, I found myself much struck by the transformation we have seen over the past several years, where innovations in web technologies were driven through small groups building on each others’ work in nimble response to new technologies as they emerge. Many examples of this on John Musser’s site: http://www.programmableweb.com/ In sharp contrast, I visited a colleague at Microsoft and noted once again the almost myopic nature of such a large organization’s approach: how does it use current Microsoft technology, how will it integrate with new Microsoft technologies, and how can we develop these new web-as-platform infrastructures on the large scale? (In psychobabble we call that assimilating vs. accommodating.) They will always be catching up to the fast and nimble response of small groups of people that do not need to be deploying technologies in the context of all the bureaucratic, political, and legal limitations of an extremely large organization. Another Microsoft friend of mine told me “I get a lot of kudos from what I learn from actually using a lot of the new web technology out there.”