Young people are doing a lot of stuff that could one day be considered "enterprise" software; it's just that the suits that buy these things don't trust them yet.
"There used to be a saying in the corporate world: 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM.' You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of 'enterprise' software companies that exist to take advantage of it. People buying technology for large organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. It's not their money. They just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe--a company with an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and software that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarily a company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let you down, will still seem to have been a prudent choice. So companies have evolved to fill that niche."
Companies used to buy mainframes, because they saw simpler machines as toy computers. Even today, big companies might write a web app in Java when they could write it much more easily in Python, because they see Python et al. as toy languages. Similarly, there are a lot of apps out there, and there will soon be many more, that the market will one day force companies to stop labeling as toys.
Why so many "Enterprise vs. Web 2.0" discussions? As if you had to pick one of the other.
The real gravy will be where the 2 meet and the ground will be fertile for the 7 million small business that the enterprise behemoths haven't been able to crack. (Salesforce.com, anyone?)
So once the social networking phenomenon settles down and enterprise software levels off, the real demand will be for people who understand both business processes and modern technologies. Regardless of age.
PG mentions this in his essay on colleges (http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html):
"There used to be a saying in the corporate world: 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM.' You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of 'enterprise' software companies that exist to take advantage of it. People buying technology for large organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. It's not their money. They just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe--a company with an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and software that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarily a company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let you down, will still seem to have been a prudent choice. So companies have evolved to fill that niche."
Companies used to buy mainframes, because they saw simpler machines as toy computers. Even today, big companies might write a web app in Java when they could write it much more easily in Python, because they see Python et al. as toy languages. Similarly, there are a lot of apps out there, and there will soon be many more, that the market will one day force companies to stop labeling as toys.