I do think widgets have potential long-term value, though they’re a bit high in the hype cycle at the moment.

(Dennis’ keynote presentation from Tuesday is available online: to see the video and synchronized slides you have to go to this portal and choose from the list of presentations, or get just the slides in PDF form.)

[Editorial note: Widgets are pretty, but this is hardly experimental, cutting edge stuff, eh?]

Well, all of the widgets I’ve seen are pretty low value “pieces of web pages.” SAP’s widgets are applications that may become the primary way many people interact with their enterprise systems. Since you don’t get any from Oracle, Microsoft, or any other apps vendor, I guess that qualifies them for “cutting edge stuff.”

Great book — “Why Not?” by Nalebuff. Talks about the many ways to innovate, and one of the best is “translation” — take a solution from one domain to another (where you might even create more value). A cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0 is that it takes ideas, technologies, and methodologies from the Web 2.0 (consumer) world and combines them with the ideas, technologies, and methodologies of the enterprise to create something much better than what the enterprise had before. That is what SAP did with widgets.

Just my €0.02 …