you consider what business leaders have given us to work with over the past decades. The problem: the latter list of start-ups I mentioned find themselves in a fragile market. Technology spending will be nearly flat or decline (depending on who you ask). Traditional IT executives who trust IBM and MS, even if they'll eventually have to pay those vendors more money in a time when they have less to spend, might keep their allegiances.

This isn't great for business users if we automatically see everyone play it safe by purchasing IBM and Microsoft. (Have you seen a SharePoint wiki? I have, and it's not pretty.) This is not a knock on the incumbents, who deserve some credit. My interview with the forward-thinking Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, shows the company has turned a page (somewhat) in clinging to old business models. IBM, for its part, has more aggressively shown willingness to move forward with Lotus Connections, which right now has a better design than the social software features in SharePoint, which is largely still a document management system.

But both companies are further removed from innovation than the enterprise 2.0 vendors. While enterprise 2.0 vendors mimic what they see in the consumer market, thus keeping them a degree of separation away from where the innovation actually occurs, the incumbents are even further removed; they simply copy the enterprise 2.0 vendors.

This isn't a sustainable model for innovation in the enterprise Web 2.0 market. With shrinking access to venture capital, there's reason to believe some of the enterprise 2.0 start-ups will fail or struggle to make money in 2009. When this happens, they'll either fold or be purchased by IBM or Microsoft.

This could have good and bad effects. On one hand, it will make the market less confusing and noisy. The number of folks who don't understand the products they peddle at a trade show will decrease, and the choices for enterprise buyers will become clearer.

Some argue that a recession like ours is actually the best time to invent something, as it forces us to do more with less. But I'm a big believer that innovators need to be worried about ideas, not about how they'll pay the bills or a staff.

If the Silicon Valley layoffs we've seen recently are any indication, Web 2.0 companies will be more worried about operations and staying afloat rather than innovation in 2009.

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