Innovation in Software

A TechCrunch UK story on Companies House brought attention to the fact that, as you can see below, the UK civil service is not yet comfortable with the Internet period, never mind Web 2.0

So I thought I’d brainstorm what would happen if CH did ever go Web 2.0 – and after this lot you might think perhaps we’re better off where we are….

• Every company would get reviewed by customers/employees (“3/5 – amazon are cheaper”)
• You’d be able to find the other companies that people like you were snooping on
• Civil servants would only ever drink Stormhoek at lunch
• We’d get rid of the stupid company classification codes and go for tags (I’d love to tag BP)
• The civil servants working there would be able to pretend they were rich and feel loved
• Paul Graham would offer Her Majesty’s Government $100k in round one funding
• All reports would be free, but contextual ads for competitors would be embedded in them
• Small companies would be hacked off that the big companies got all the attention
• why the lucky stiff would write a guide to company formations involving badgers and cheese, whilst releasing a toolkit for formenting communist revolution
• A company’s value would no longer be dependent on turnover, but instead the number of ‘friends’ they had.
• An obscure company selling Refrigerated Apes would hit the FTSE 100 within a fortnight
• Google would immediately start work on a “CH killer” and the DTI would take a look at selling the whole department on eBay. Google’s system would suck, but still get raved about
• Civil servants would start to wear button-up shirts, but wish they could afford English Cut
• Company formations on video would be the most popular category on YouTube
• We might actually get usable online forms, rather than the mess directors currently have to go through
• When company formation numbers went up, thousands of other people would start offering the same services with no idea of what they were doing
• We’d all complain that the CH developer’s program sucked
• 37signals would complain that we all sucked for not using their product ‘RoundTable’, a company formation system with just one single button marked “Make me rich please”
• Instead of listing Director’s home addresses, there’d just be a bunch of skype/msn login names listed
• Directors would hold exclusive parties where they would talk about nothing else other than how many hits their reports got on the CH website
• Apple would sell downloadable companies that cost 50% more, but had a nice font and logo on the artwork

Any more people can think of?