Why are Intranets Stagnant?

The evolution of the World Wide Web over the last five years has been nothing short of astounding. Intranets, on the other hand, haven't progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago. I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since...well, since before the word "intranet" was adopted. I'm working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the "read-write" web. Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I'm aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by Digg and LinkedIn, file sharing services like YouTube or AJAXish tools like Digg | Shel Holtz is principal of a shel of my former self