Are enterprise forums going to be a thing of the past?

I was reading elsewhere about vBulletin 5 and how Internet Brands might be targetting the enterprise forum software market with the higher prices, paid support, etc and something kind of struck me.

Are enterprise forum scripts going to one day be a thing of the past?

Because whether you like it or not, if anyone listens to hype it's probably big businesses and their marketing team. And with all the talk of forums being old news and social networks like Facebook and Twitter being the future, who's to say it won't be the big businesses believing this? I've actually seen quite a large companies/organisations shutting down their forums and concentrating on social networking (Nintendo is one of them, I think ITV was another).

What do you think? Could there be dark days ahead for the likes of Jive and Lithium? Will large companies see their forums as an unnecessary waste of resources and just leave it at a bunch of Facebook and Twitter pages in future?

 

It does make sense from a business prospective. No buying software licenses for a community, no paying people to maintain it, nor worrying about security issues effecting other services on your server.

You get brownie points with people because everything is public and there is no registration.. Pretty much everyone has a Facebook login already.