These guys are talking from the perspective of vendors and toolmakers. This session might be better entitled: “A Toolmakers perspective on how you can make a business serving businesses with social software”. Since they are dealing with large companies, the ones who have money, the speakers are getting into social factors that apply to large companies, things like managers' need to control.

My question is this: Can you really get value from social software at the corporate level? These seem like questions that individuals and small bands of people can answer. People will see, “Hey, I can achieve X if I use del.icio.us or some other software and then proceed individually.” Successful social software seems to be aimed at this level of decision maker. Business models that fail seem to depend on corporate adoption and the types of prices they will pay.

I'll go out on a limb and make the following observations:

• All social software is an infrastructure play.
• All infrastructure benefits from network scale effects.
• Therefore, social software at the corporate level suffers from scale inefficiencies, and social software is at its most valuable outside of the corporation.
• To achieve scale affects, social software has to make its sale at the individual level.