Lurching Legacy into 2.0

Arrived in Boston this morning for the Enterprise 2.0 software conference.  Caught the very end of Weinberger's presentation and McAfee's talk.  Maybe it was the red eye I took this morning, but I got fairly infuriated by the IBM presentation.  Michael Rhodin didn't show up, but the content was probably the same and how it started was enterprise marketing gone wild.

He described evolving IBM Websphere's evolutionary approach to becoming 2.0.  But what the heck does Ajax on the interface, "semantic tagging" and RSS feeds have to do with Social Software?  What the fuck does a lifestyle driven e-commerce implementation have to do with Social Software?  What does a Ajax interface on top of a content management system have to do with Social Software?

Then he described Info 2.0, an integrated suite that enables the creation of mashable content into easily customizable, instant dashboards.  Again, Ajax pixie dust.  But I'll get a demo.  He did describe QEDWiki, a great mashup platform and horrible collaboration wiki, but a genuine innovation within the space.  Can't wait until it is more than a research product.  Then he described Lotus Connections, a social software suite I would even recommend.  If you have 130k employees.  Ah, then they launched IBM Lotus Quickr, with content sharing, team blogs, wikis, team calendar and lists.  Again, I'll get a demo and at this point pardon the above sarcasm as I have an inherent bias.  But I'm wondering what my fellow enterprise irregulars think.

I might just excuse myself from all large vendor sessions at this conference.