Best of Web Office This Week
I'm participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this week.
The big news of course was Google releasing a Premier Edition of its Google Apps suite of office tools. The new-look suite includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page – plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a set of APIs and third party services, and a solid support and hosting package. We covered this on Read/WriteWeb, noting that it still falls short of a full office suite – missing is presentations, CRM, JotSpot(!) and other things. Also lacking is full integration and collaboration between the apps, a la Basecamp or Central Desktop. So Google Apps is a step forward, but by no means the final deal.
I was interested to read Zoho’s reaction to this – as Zoho is one of the small startups with its own office suite. In their blog they wrote that its aim is to be a best-of-breed solution that gets a nice little slice of the market:
“Our business plan is not based on us beating Microsoft or Google, it is based on serving customers well enough to earn a profitable share of the market. Business is not superbowl, though it often appears that way in a 24×7 news cycle."
Not everyone wanted to write about Google Apps this week ;-) Also check out Between The Lines' post, which warns us to read the fine print of Google Office.
Two in-depth office 20 articles this week worth checking out are: Dion Hinchcliffe’s Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets and Rod Boothby’s article about the recombinatorial web.
And two blogs that are doing a good job of covering office 2.0 startups are Rafe Needleman’s CNET blog Webware and Ismael Ghalimi’s IT|Redux. Catching my eye on Webware this week was Yackpack, a messaging tool “that lets you chat live as a group or swap recorded messages to group members, all within your Web browser". Also check out Ismael’s Desktop Roundup, which profiles “16 online desktop applications, from Clic!Dev to YourMinis".
Any other office 2.0 news or apps that got your attention this week?
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I really liked WIRED's take on Google Apps premier. Probably because they came to similar conclusions that I did in my post on online office apps earlier this month. ;)
WIRED makes a good point: "there's no Wi-Fi on airplanes yet" ... It's just one of the many reasons enterprise users won't be switching from Office any time soon, but it is an important one. I think in the next couple of years Microsoft with offer some sort of online component to Office (like a stripped down web version that auto-syncs with the offline software) and some type of online collaboration (integration with MSN messenger allowing people to co-edit and chat about a document would be awesome). When that happens... Google Apps will be DOA, most likely.
Good morning,
Thanks for the links to IT|Redux.
Quick comment: the Office 2.0 Conference is an event organized by IT|Redux. The event you are refering to is the Under the Radar Conference, which also covers the topic of Office 2.0, but isn't called Office 2.0 Conference, for which IT|Redux owns the trademark.
Best regards
-Ismael
Ismael, noted -- thanks. I updated the wording there.