Simplicity and Hubris: Web vs Enterprise Development

I would find it really funny that most people do not understand the difference between intelligent and control interfaces if would not mean that lots of time and money are wasted trying to make intelligent interfaces work as control interfaces, or Web 2.0 Internet solutions work for Enterprise intranet problems.

It is the typical "since Google/Apple/Facebook/Twitter/SomeFreeAndPublicWebSite uses it for X/Y/Z/Q it should be great for the system I am building" syndrome.

Well, it might be great for them when they are trying to solve the X/Y/Z/Q problem, but as it turns out, many developers do not work at places that build the kind of systems this companies build, and are not trying to solve the kind of problems this companies are trying to solve.

Some people think that since our problems do not seem as technologically  impressive as those targeted by free public websites they must be easier, or that since a solution worked for the super huge public web site X then it should also work for the tiny intranet system we are building, well, the truth is that most of the times this solutions do not help at all. Please don't get me wrong, some of their ideas are usable, but we need to remember that in the dreaded Intranet Enterprise development world rules are very different:

• We do not have huge hardware resources at our disposal
• We do not have a huge budget and the hiring power to get the best and only the best experts to work with us
• Our systems are not of the"just register in this form this once and after this use the site with the mouse" kind, our users hate the mouse, because they are going to be capturing data all day, and for that, the keyboard is king (and the mouse is irrelevant)
• We need to interact directly with "special hardware" (such as scanners, printers, finger print readers etc) and browsers do not know how to talk to those, a browser can not even print with precision without help from Acrobat Reader.
• We need the behavior of our systems to be consistent and always the same (Web Search engine users do not care if the search results present different information or the same information in different order as long as the "relevant" stuff is in the first pages, Enterprise users expect search results to be exactly the same as last time, unless they have done something to alter that, and when they do, the change they expect is predictable)
• Our users want access to their data now, and do not care for excuses like "sorry but there is no access to the super massively great cloud because our infinitum connection/cable modem/whatever is failing"
• Our users want data to be confidential (although they do not even understand the meaning of security and its costs). Having all your data "in the cloud" sounds great, until the country where the clouds exists decides that it wants to apply "economic sanctions" to yours and begins by forbidding you access to the data in the cloud because the company that owns it is controlled by their laws. The day I see Google store its internal mission critical strategic information in Amazon's servers or vice-versa is the day I will believe that the Cloud is a safe place to store that kind of information.
  

All those "Web 2.0" companies have done little to help this stuff (In fact, they have created lots of problems, by forcing us intranet Enterprise developers to use primitive runtime platforms (web browsers) to deliver our applications . It is not that they are evil, it is just that they are not targeting the kind of problems Enterprise developers need to solve. And I hate when I see people recommending approaches that worked fine for this companies for problems that just can not be solved with them.