An unfolding story has led me to see an AppGap (metaphorically) as the space between the two edges of a vise. As social software leaks into organizations, the younger, inventive, staff migrate to the corporate (unsupported) wikis to self-construct the knowledge and planning base for their projects. (The vise is twisting up from the bottom.) The senior folks (over 35) have only just got used to Ms Office SharePoint to manage large collections of documents and project information to ensure that they will be archived and secured appropriately. (The vise is squeezing down from the top.) In the middle, someone who must communicate to both audiences and bring them both into community is trying to figure out the least painful way to reach everyone. Of course, it’s an email list. Or, cross-post, cut-and-paste, schlep the buckets of knowledge from one application to the other.

But that doesn’t solve the problem of how to encourage co-creation and collaboration across this divide. Nor how, in the future, this organization can engage its customers in the conversations that it needs to be having with them. In the cloud. In real time. We look for solutions in social software, applications that appeal across generational divides. It’s about balance (as I’ve written before).

Sadly, it hasn’t occurred to Microsoft that rapprochement may be a better strategy than hegemony. I don’t want wiki editing to be rich-text format. I want the wikis I create in MOSS to be completely compatible with the standard wiki coding. That would have at least maintained some space between the edges of the vise. But I’d still be between a rock and a hard place.