Sitting on a geyser: hoping iPhone in the enterprise won't take hold right away 

Forrester Research published a new report about adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, mostly covering social tools, judging from reporting about the report.

Hearing about it made me connect up something else that caught my attention recently in the realm of so-called consumer tech making its way into business. A piece of copy crossed my desk last week: advice for managers of field workers from a mobile software vendor. It warned against inspection or inventory software that depends on a wireless connection because "the internet isn't always available."

Call me an iPhone fangirl (and that would be correct) but it sounded a lot like an industry that knows the game is about to change. Sounds like a sector that's working, like newspapers and the record companies, to quick brush as many crumbs as possible into decent-sized piles of business until they figure out what to do next.

What will happen to these mobile software makers and to complicated and expensive mobile device management and synchronication schemes when the iPhone and online data stores come to play? Are people working on it in stealth? You don't read anything about, or it least it doesn't seem to be bubbling up.

One factor might postpone the inevitable. The individuals and companies who would make the new stuff might not be interested in developing it, or it might be outside their field of vision. Valley types seem wedded to the consumer play, the fun stuff with potential for large numbers of of eyeballs, possibly because a lot of them are kids, or because the ad-supported model appears to be the only model?

Related: the PDA is dead on Tekzilla. 4:30 in. Patrick and Veronica say "wait for the iPhone SDK." I don't know. I have a feeling a lot of the good stuff will happen in the browser, even when there's a bunch of installable software available.