But handicappers who want to bet on the next hot enterprise technology might look to what's happening in the consumer space for ideas, said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner who helped compile that company's list of Cool Vendors in Web 2.0 report. "What we're seeing on the Web is that most of the cool, innovative companies and technologies are coming in the consumer space," he said. "These are technologies that tend to come into enterprises later through consumerization."

Google's evolving Google Apps suite, which includes elements of Upstartle's Writely word processor and 2Web's spreadsheet technology and online calendaring, is a great example, he said. It's not like enterprises are making strategic decisions to migrate from Office to Google Apps, but those programs are beginning to augment legacy enterprise platforms like Microsoft Office.

Evidence of that shift has been popping up recently -- like the recent story about employees at consulting powerhouse McKinsey & Co. and JPMorgan Chase using public Google Calendars to schedule meetings. "Lots of users go around the systems that are in place," Smith said.

That story highlights one of the big themes with the latest wave of tech startups: collaboration tools that allow teams of workers to view and edit the same documents together.

Those kinds of features are still sorely lacking in many enterprises, especially when teams need to include members who are outside of a company, where domain restrictions, compliance worries, and IT security policies often curtail true collaboration. Web-based suites like Google Apps create a free and easy way for ersatz teams to collaborate, while platforms like Yahoo Mail and Gmail often provide more storage, better search capabilities, and easier access than can be found on enterprise desktops.

"Not a lot of organizations have rolled out those kinds of features, so individuals within enterprises are on their own to seek out Google Desktop Search or similar products from Microsoft and Yahoo," Smith notes.

But the disjunction between what's going on in the consumer space and in the enterprise may be short lived.

"A lot of these features have started to be delivered by larger companies," Smith notes, pointing to Microsoft's Sharepoint platform, IBM's Lotus, and products from BEA, SAP, and Oracle. "You're going to see a lot of enhancements come out."

In a short time, Smith and others agree, lightweight, Web- and standards-based tools as well as the growth of software-as-a-service applications could make traditionally thorny and expensive enterprise projects like knowledge management and collaboration affordable and ubiquitous -- a message you'll hear from more than one aspiring CEO during our Month of Enterprise Startups.

As for becoming the next YouTube? Smith said that megadeal probably isn't a good yardstick by which to measure the potential of the enterprise startup market. Google is more concerned about protecting its core markets in search and online advertising to wade too deep into the enterprise market, whereas giants like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft have more diverse product offerings and are far better positioned to scoop up promising startups.

"Google's not a traditional software company, and I don't think they have aspirations to be that," he said.

Ah well. There's always next year.