For some time, the "Web 2.0" trend has been hitting the enterprise and it is already a multi-hundred million dollar market.

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But that's clearly just the start of it.

At the Social Networking Conference in San Francisco Antony Brydon, former CEO and founder of Visible Path gave some insight from a panel board discussing enterprise adoption said: "IBM arguably has more employees connected to LinkedIn than to its own Lotus Connections system" and that's an important thing to note.

There is a change of guard. Software used to be thought of as "automation" or a functionally driven exchange of information.

In practice that result is often cumbersome and in fact, has often proved to be more complex than the processes it is meant to automate.

Computers just don't make good decisions, humans do.

So, today, the Social Software movement might be thought of as a revolution where the humans are back in charge.

Instead of trying to make choices for you, the software attempts to make relevant introductions and allow simple collaboration, often as simple as blogging and that simplicity is the golden rule.

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In the "dot-com boom" days, it seemed many startups had stars in their eyes because the web allowed a level of automation never before seen. But what happened to these ideas? They mostly fell flat.

It is ironic that the younger generation intuitively understood that the power was still the person and that software didn't have to be a cold place where information travels along a rigid set of conditional and pre-programmed processes but rather extends the human reach of connections and collaborations.

Even IBM realizes that the Lotus Notes style of corporate process has little to offer when it is so cumbersome that people don't even use it when you force them to - instead, they gravitate to LinkedIn which may not be particularly "social" but at least it doesn't get in your way with someone else's rigid concept of how information should be handled.

Here's to the end of process control and getting back to the power of human interaction.