The drive to attach 2.0 to anything that moves continues with Symantec’s announcement of Security 2.0. According to Wednesday’s Information Week.

“(Symantec) is embarking on a new strategy for helping businesses counter threats to their data and systems, while at the same time making systems available and easy to use for employees and customers, says Symantec CTO Mark Bregman. Calling this new tact Security 2.0, Symantec will expand beyond its security products to deliver, or partner to deliver, technology that aids with regulatory compliance, the availability of systems and data, and performance management, Bregman said Wednesday at the Interop conference.”

While this may be a new tact for Symantec, the 2.0 tact is starting to get a little wearisome for the rest of us. The dot-oh numbering convention, sometimes called versioning, comes from the world of software and firmware, where newer versions of software carry higher numbers to distinguish them from previous versions. We’ve become quite fond of certain versions. Who can forget Apple System 8.6, Mac OS X (hey wait a minute, how did we get a Roman numeral in here?), DOS 5.0 or Windows 3.1 for example?

Rampant 2.0ism takes many forms. The most popular form in current usage is Web 2.0, which has more definitions than “Service Oriented Architecture.” The current issue of Information Week’s Optimize magazine features an article on Enterprise 2.0. Some have questioned the validity of Enterprise 2.0. The term was added to Wikipedia and subsequently deleted, causing a spirited and ongoing debate about both the term and the larger issue of who should decide criteria for permitting an entry in the online encyclopedia.

Technology guru Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0, may be the earliest use of attaching a 2.0 to something other than software. Among Esther’s ventures are Release 1.0; the Release 4.0 blog which was apparently retired on January 22, 2004 and redirects to Release 1.0; books titled Release 2.0 and Release 2.1; and a workshop called When 2.0. I am not sure if there is a Release 3.0, but I suspect there is.

Meanwhile, Wired reported last week that “everyone’s new favorite buzzword is Office 2.0. This term, while it may seem quite nebulous out of the gate, actually points to a revolutionary way of thinking about applications and software.” That’s the nice thing about revolutions and industry standards. There are so many to choose from!

Government Computer News reported on September 12 that “this morning at a company event in New York City, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins introduced what he called Dell 2.0 (we’ll forgive the cliché of putting 2.0 after just about anything to indicate something’s new and improved–we’re guilty of floating the notion for our own headlines from time to time).” I congratulate GCN on its apparent editorial integrity, but urge the publication to follow through with an all-out ban on the use of this appalling cliché.

A September 13 article on the McLeans (Canada) site takes the 2.0 craze outside of IT with the headline Meet NAFTA 2.0.

Even mainstream newsmagazines are embracing this 2-hot trend. Time Magazine reports on The Bible 2.0, and Newsweek describes a new breed of Japanese entrepreneurs as Samurai 2.0.

Watch this space for some very exciting announcements as Hyde Park fulfills its promise to be the first company in the world to offer Web 4.0-enabled technology. I can’t say much more about this, except that it will be revolutionary.