What's the value to the enterprise, beyond marketing and PR, of technologies like Web video and audio?

One easy answer is that there's a lot of training to be done out there. A lot of it is already available. Search online for "Ruby on Rails" [an open-source application framework] and you can find conference video and training video, and developers who just turn the camera on and say, "Hey, I'm going to teach you something about Ruby on Rails." So the corporate training side is going to be interesting.

This is also important for CEOs and executives. A CEO is paid to communicate. If I'm a CEO who can't communicate with the written word, I'd be worrying about my future. How else do you convince people to buy your product, that your new products are good? But let's say you have a CEO who can't write very well, so you put him on video every week. Let him podcast. There are ways to get an executive out there. Executives should be looking at these things not in terms of TV-sized audiences, but smaller audiences. These are great ways to communicate with investors, or the press. I interviewed Bill Gates for 17 minutes, and that meant he didn't have to gas up the jet and go talk to a small crowd at a conference to get his point across. You can get geekier, go more in depth. [Dallas Mavericks owner] Mark Cuban gets really geeky on his blog about referees and what happened in a game, much more than Sports Illustrated would in an article.

Also, IT departments need to know that this stuff is going to hit their networks. If you're building a company based on video, or using a lot of video, you need to understand it. These aren't little text files, they're 200- to 800-megabyte files. You have to be prepared for bandwidth costs and scalability issues that come with serving video out to a lot of people.

As part of your new job you've spent some time inside Google. That must make for some interesting comparisons to your former employer, Microsoft. What's your take on Google as a player in the enterprise?

Google hasn't made an impact on the enterprise yet. And I don't see them challenging Microsoft or taking money off the Office team's plate in the enterprise for the next two years. Further out, however, they are positioned to come in and take some business from Microsoft. If I were still at Microsoft, I would be freaking out. The first thing Google will do is stop the growth of Microsoft Office. Small startups aren't going to buy Office anymore, they're going to use the free apps on the Internet. Is Google going to get Chevron to switch from Exchange? No. Not soon. What they are going to do is add new value that Microsoft can't, like the Google calendar team showing me how to put my calendar on my blog. It's really nice. Those kinds of things are what you'll see enterprise companies start to use in little projects here and there. Google will sneak in the back door, just as Microsoft did 25 years ago with DOS and PCs.

Everyone uses Google to search, but I don't see things like GoogleTalk being used a lot in big companies. Even Google Maps has just around 18 percent market share, and certainly big companies aren't ready to use Google's Apps for Your Domain office suite. But at small companies like ours, it's different. We're using it everywhere, because you don't have to pay for it, and it requires no IT manager. Our PodTech e-mail goes through Google.

There's a lot of buzz on blogs that so-called Web 2.0 companies are in something of a bubble mindset. Obviously it's not a big financial bubble involving retail investors, but do you see this market overheating?

Absolutely. It's all froth, all the time. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of companies building interesting businesses around community involvement. Companies like Wikia are seeing their traffic going up and up. But their business model is selling ads, and there's no telling if that is going to work over time.

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