Office 2.0 on Overdrive
Thursday, April 13th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
The pace at which new Office 2.0 applications are being released seems to be accelerating. For some applications, like Google Calendar, it’s good news. For others, such as ajaxXLS, not really so.
Google just released Google Calendar, and as Jeff Nolan pointed out, the whole blogosphere is abuzz. The excellent 30 Boxes, which very much defined the space for Web 2.0 calendaring, is less than two months old, yet it’s already being dumped by early adopters in favor of Google’s implementation. Brian Benzinger provides is usual thorough review, and I agree with him: Google Calendar rocks. I only wish that it worked with Safari — which is decidedly faster than Mozilla, even when using the universal binaries for Intel-powered mac laptops. I would also have liked to get JavaScript badges for easily publishing events on HTML pages. I guess I’ll have to find a good feed processing tool that can handle any XML feed, instead of just Atom or RSS ones.
ajaxXLS is the new Office 2.0 spreadsheet application by Michael Robertson, and according to Marc Orchant, it’s not ready for prime time yet. I must agree with him and would not switch from Zoho Sheet. As mentioned earlier, building an Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Excel is no easy task, and certainly one that is an order of magnitude more complex than building a simple alternative to Microsoft Word, which ajaxWrite managed to do fairly well.
All that tells me is that in the rush to get a complete Office 2.0 Suite out of the door, some groups are cutting corners where they should not. In that respect, Google is doing a pretty good job of developing their applications patiently and going live only when they work for most of what they’re supposed to. Therefore, my advice to Office 2.0 ventures is the following: stick to your guns, nail one or two applications down, let early adopters — bleeding edge pioneers, shall I say — assemble best of breed setups, then figure out ways to integrate with other applications. Once more concrete usage patterns will have been identified, you will still have plenty of time to put a suite together, but keep in mind that it will not look anything like Office 1.0, therefore there should be no rush trying to replicate the later for the web. Nobody really cares for that.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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[…] Ismael Ghalimi has assembled a comprehensive, well-written body of content about Office 2.0 on his IT Redux blog. In his most recent post, he touches on a topic I’ve brought up in a few recent posts - the rough state of affairs in some recent online application offerings. More interesting is the observation he makes that the switching costs inherent in these applications is exceedingly low and people seem to be hopping from one shiny new bauble to the next as quickly as they’re made available. […]
And Google has bought the excellent Web 2.0 word processor Writely, which I love. Another strong arrow in “Google’s Office” quiver.
I think you may look at EditGrid for online spreadsheet. We launched our public beta in early April and our next release with even better usability will be out this coming Friday.
With reference to Google Calendar on the Mac: it works fine on Camino, which is a great deal faster and smoother than Firefox (and, some say, than Safari).
I should also point out what, from my perspective, is a knock-down sign that something has the potential for reaching tipping point: in gCal’s case, my partner — who has resisted 30boxes and numerous others — has embraced Google’s version to the point where she started inviting me to stuff even before I’d got to grips with that bit of Google’s function set.
Although I noticed that 30boxes has just started right-clicks to edit.
With luck, the feature wars start here…
Just reading about here. Another thing I haven’t seen ou miss is that so called web2.0 services and “office 2.0” services are doing is democratizing innovation.
They’re quickly making everything from communications toools like IM and email and even VOIP available all over the world regardless of class, or computing power (just as long as you have net connectivity.) This is to say we’re democratizing the very tools which are so important to our productivity in life, STARTING with those that are most important to us.
However this must be considered in such perspectives… for it sheds some light on some of the core danger of a world dependend apon webservices. There will come a point where we’ll need to regain balance between the desktop application and webservice. Not just because there are times when we are offline… but when you think about the digital divide because of things like censorship. For example the “great firewall of china”. This doesn’t threaten the success of these webservices… but it does threaten to create huge pockets of darkness where innocation cannot flow.
The antidote therefore… and there are many antidotes to geting around such firewalls… but the biggest antidote to all this is in open source applicatios. Strong webservices with well thought out and integrated open source desktop applications.
Certainly google is thinking about this right!? They must realize that they need to make standards around gmails interaction with desktop mail applications so open source innovators can bring labels and calendars to the desktop, the PDA, and wherever else they may. Gmail and it’s many attached webservices should drive innovation and sales in harware and software… and it would be to the huge benifit not the detriment of google. Interaction models between gmail need to continue to be transaction based… like pop. I should be able to be offline in Timbuktu and not only to read and reply to my email but flip through and make changes to my calendar which will then sync the next time I connect.
There are so many great pro’s to office 2.0… but connectivity can never be ensured… to rest soley on 2.0 would be a mistake. Surely you’ve in your travels run into this? How do you cope when you’re off the grid?
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