Tara Hunt (a fellow Canadian in San Francisco) has a great post entitled “Why the small will overcome”.

Tara believes that small companies have an advantage over large organizations for 3 reasons:

• Advantage #1 - The Giant Corporations are Asleep
• Advantage #2 - The Giant Corporations Don’t Know You Exist
• Advantage #3 - The Giant Corporations Are Clueless When it Comes to Community

Here’s a little story to prove Tara’s point:

Earlier this week, while I was at the Gilbane Conference, I ran talked to a sales person for one of the CMS vendors. He asked me what a blog was. And what was the difference between a blog and a Wiki. I told him that a blog was an entire CMS implementation for one person, available free and at the click of a mouse, with virtually no set-up but infinite possibilities for customization and configuration. I told him about SixApart and WordPress and showed him Technorati’s crazy hockey stick graph of the amazing growth in blogging.

He said “Hmm, interesting. All those little start ups will probably end up getting bought by big CMS vendors.”

He had no clue about the market, no clue about the threat that blogs pose to his company, and zero clue about the likely, probably inevitable, demise of every large CMS company. Why spend $1 million on a huge CMS system when WordPress is free.

Do all big corporations fail to listen?

No. Microsoft is a great example of a company that is learning how to listen to open Internet based communities. Robert Scoble took some issues with Tara’s post.

Scoble said that while big companies have trouble listening, “we have our secret weapons: Technorati and Bloglines and Feedster and NewsGator and IceRocket and other blog search engines. They let us listen like a small startup.”

Scoble goes on to say that even when Big Companies do listen, they have trouble reacting quickly and communicating it internally.

“The problem is, even when we hear, it takes a lot of convincing internally.”

So, let’s add to Tara’s list.

• Advantage #4 - The Giant Corporations Have Not Learnt How to Move Quickly

Scoble says that the secret to solving the internal communication problem are internal enterprise blogs. He’s right. But who has internal enterprise blogs? The CEO writing one blog authored by PR does not count. A real internal enterprise blogging platform means at least one blog per person. If you have 100,000 employees, you need at least 100,000 blogs. I have yet to hear of a single company that has gone that far.

So… Robert Scoble….let me take you at your word.

If internal enterprise blogs are the way to help big companies, could you please ask your colleagues back at Microsoft to start making a decent internal enterprise blogging platform?

There are other people out there like me who are trying to obtain the next generation communication platform for their enterprise users. I don’t need something small. I need something that lets me deploy literally 100,000+ blogs with audit trails, security, and tools that help me make the connection between my internal social media platform and my Service Orientated Architecture enterprise systems.

For example, say I was working at a bank as a relationship manager. I want to create a blog about one of my clients, and start to drop in Mashets, which integrate real enterprise information into my blog posts, such loan information, and covenant monitoring data and basic stuff like LiveClip powered meeting announcements.

Sharepoint just doesn’t solve the problem. It was never designed to solve a problem this big. And that’s probably why you use WordPress. ;)

I have been blogging for months about Web Office tools, which begin with enterprise blogs, but include a series of other integrated elements.

BTW, to me Web Office is not AJAX versions of Word and Excel. Companies already have those tools. They want new tools. Blogs, Wikis, a mashup platform.

Anil Dash and the crew at SixApart are in the early stages of rolling out a real enterprise version of MovableType. But, considering that Widgets were originally rolled out only for TypePad, it is clear that SixApart has many other opportunities to focus on. Multi user WordPress sort-of answers the need (and has the real potential to get much better). Toni Schneider and Matt Mullenweg at Automattic really do “get it” when it comes to the needs of enterprise bloggers. Traction Software has an intelligence gathering part-wiki part-blog tool that has some nice enterprise features.

But, none of these vendors has the complete package. At least not yet. At the moment, Vassil and the crew at Blogtronix could easily beat them all to the punch.

I have written a paper called “The next wave in productivity tools: Web Office” that is a very high-level specification of what big companies need to improve their internal communication.

So, continuing with what has become an open letter to Robert Scoble, if Microsoft is really listening, please give the paper to Ray Ozzie. Tell him the paper describes real problems that big companies need to solve and acts as a highlevel description of the Web Office system we would like to be able to buy. And it’s got a fancy picture of him!

As added motivation, tell him that a copy of the paper is currently circulating within Google thanks to some friends of mine from the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.

Mind you, realistically, that might not be much concern. The bigger Google gets, the more tone deaf they seem to be. And Tara’s right that Microsoft is starting to listen:

Take for instance [Microsoft’s] recent Microformats embracing. They could have gone all Google Base on the community’s ass, but they proved to be the company that got it.

From this geek’s perspective, Tara is seriously funny.