What I learned at the Office 2.0 Conference
Saturday, October 14th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
With over 450 participants (375 iPods only, sorry…), 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors, the inaugural Office 2.0 Conference was a success. Eating our own dog food, we used as many Office 2.0 tools as we could to organize the event, and most of them worked. In and by itself, this served as a good validation for the concept. And now that the iPods have been loaded with music, the iMacs unplugged and sold, and the dust settled, here is what I learned about Office 2.0 from participating in this one-of-a-kind event.
What is it?
From most of the articles written about the concept, one question emerges: What is Office 2.0? Nobody seems to agree on the definition, therefore I will offer mine. But before you suggest any changes to it, try it for a while, play with the tools, and see whether it works for you or not. Actual experimentations will teach you a lot more than trying to refine the definition of a concept that is very much in its infancy today.
Office 2.0: Office productivity environment enabled by online services used through a Web browser. By storing data online and relying on applications provided as Web services, it fosters collaboration and extends mobility, while promoting a user-centric model that fuels innovation and increases productivity.
Who is it for?
Individual users and Very Small Businesses (VSB). On one hand, Office 2.0 is not ready for the enterprise, and it’s a good thing. Trying to make Office 2.0 work for the enterprise today will strip the concept off all the good things that make it interesting. The enterprise needs reliability, scalability and security, and such attributes take some time to implement. On the other hand, individual users and Very Small Businesses — defined by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs as concerns that have 15 or fewer employees with average annual receipts that do not exceed $1 million — are more concerned by cost, convenience, and collaboration. In that respect, Office 2.0 is perfect for them, and almost ready for prime time. Many thanks to Bob Sutor for having helped me understand this.
Individual users and Very Small Businesses, alongside students and small non-profit organizations, will be the early adopters for Office 2.0. By adopting it, they will realize business benefits that departments of larger organizations will have a hard time ignoring over time, leading to broader corporate adoption. Eventually, the enterprise will catch up and adopt the concept, not so much as a replacement for existing Office 1.0 tools and practices, but as a way to better deal with the ecosystem of VSBs and SMBs they do business with. As a corollary, the biggest business opportunity for Office 2.0 might be in helping the enterprise use Office 2.0 technologies to establish closer business relationships with their VSB and SMB partners.
Why does it matter?
Because without it, Nicholas G. Carr is right in saying that IT doesn’t matter. The IT industry is not growing anymore, mainly because IT customers cannot gain any measurable productivity gains from their traditional IT investments anymore. Sorry Nick, nobody wants you to be right on this one for too long.
Some might say that nobody needs a better word processor, or a better spreadsheet, and for most of us, this might be true. But I would offer that most of us need a different word processor, and a different spreadsheet. We need different office productivity tools, ones that foster collaboration, that support our nomadic lives, that make us feel better about the work we are doing. I have seen such tools at the Office 2.0 Conference, and I want them today. They are not perfect yet, but for many, myself included, they will be good enough. And once you realize what they will make you capable of, you’ll agree with me that you need a different spreadsheet, which later on will turn out to be better than the one you have today. Now, if it feels like I said one thing and the opposite in a single paragraph, it just means that you’re paying attention and that I did not agree with the naysayers at the first place.
Whose lunch will be eaten?
Nobody’s. If you think Office 2.0 will eat into Microsoft’s Office business, you’re missing the larger picture. The introduction of Office 2.0 onto the marketplace will do to the Office 1.0 market exactly what the introduction of the PC did to the mainframe market: nothing. When the PC was introduced in 1981, the mainframe market was not growing much anymore, and it did not grow nor shrink significantly since then. Instead, introducing the PC just increased the overall market, by an order of magnitude or two. The same will happen with Office 2.0.
The reason for this is pretty simple: the bulk of the IT industry is focused on the enterprise today, especially within high-income countries. Since the PC and the office productivity suite were introduced in the 80’s, nothing else has been sold to Very Small Businesses, beside Internet connections and QuickBooks. According to a recent World Bank Review, the SME share of GDP is 51.45% in high-income countries, which themselves contribute to the vast majority of IT sales. Office 2.0 will be the next growth engine for the IT industry at large, and if Microsoft can re-invent itself like IBM did in the 90’s, its shareholders should expect significant returns from it. Note to Ray Ozzie: please prove me right.
Who cares?
Me, of course, and you as well, for you would not be reading this poor prose otherwise. SAP, which had 10 attendees at the Conference, and Microsoft, which had 8. Venture Capitalists, who were quick to point that the market will be dominated by Google and Microsoft, yet had over 50 of their peers come to the conference. They did not know about the iPod give-away in advance, and I cannot believe that they came for the food. For a VC more than for anyone else, time is money. If they spent their time there, I must believe that there is some money to be made, somewhere. Vendors, of which 45 sponsored the conference, and 85 others participated either as speakers or attendees. The Office 2.0 Databases currently lists 286 applications, so there is plenty of interest on the supply side.
On the demand side, we’re not even at the beginning of the beginning, but I would expect things to move fast there. When something works for someone, it does not take long for other people having the same need to figure it out as well. When everybody thought that nobody needed a better search engine, Google came out and changed the world. Granted, they got a little bit of help from established players like Yahoo! — thank you KPCB, thank you Sequoia, but today, Google is an established player itself, and its release of Google Docs on the Conference’s first day sent the right signal: Office 2.0 is real, and you better pay attention. For the next edition of the Office 2.0 Conference, one thing is certain: you will get more vendors, but even more users, and these will be the ones making the demos.
What’s working?
Most of the applications that were presented at the conference are working today. EchoSign won Best of Show, and it’s totally deserved. Joyent received the Best Office 2.0 Suite Award, and their user interface, strongly inspired by the Mac OS X operating system, certainly makes it a very attractive option. Finally, Vyew got praised for a superb demonstration, and I’ll definitely start playing with this innovative presentation tool.
For myself, I was very impressed by a couple of companies: Koral might have created the very first Document Management System that will work for end-users, System One has developed the most sophisticated blogging tool I have ever seen, and Smartsheet.com has demonstrated that it is possible to come up with a better spreadsheet, not because it has more features, but because it focuses on the ones that make sense. Last but not least, my good friends at Zoho released Zoho Virtual Office X and added single sign-on capabilities to its entire suite, making it the most complete and most integrated Office 2.0 Suite currently available on the market.
What’s not working?
Having 100 people and 45 demo pods connected to the Internet through one hotel connection while someone is trying to give a live demo is not a good idea. As was said before, Office 2.0 needs broadband connections to the Internet. If you’re offline, Office 2.0 does not work, period. This is one of the most popular objections to Office 2.0, but it’s also the easier to fix. All we have to do is wait. Within five years, anyone who will need or want to be connected will, anywhere in the world, at anytime, and at virtually no cost. If you do not believe me, try developing synchronization software that works, and let’s see who gets there first. And if you find yourself in a plane without any Internet connection, maybe it’s time for you to read a book or a magazine, or take a nap. Let’s get real: the need for high connectivity is an illusion.
Beyond connectivity, the list of bugs for Office 2.0 is fairly long and growing, but if you contrast them to the benefits you get from online collaboration and true mobility, the choice should be pretty easy to make. If you fancy yourself as an early adopter for new technologies, there has never been a better time to give Office 2.0 a try. Plus, we need you to find the bugs that we’ve not found yet, and tell us whether they really need to get fixed or not.
Where do I get it?
This Office 2.0 setup is a good place to start. Another way to look at the same information is through the Office 2.0 Database. The real challenge in building a working setup is in having to make selections from too many choices. If you’re a cynic, you should find comfort in the convinction that many Office 2.0 companies will die before long, reducing the number of options who will have to deal with. If you’re a pragmatist, you will quickly realize that having multiple options is a good thing, and that switching costs are relatively low today. And if you’re a passionate hobbyist, just remember that the PC industry was built by people like you, a chap named William being first among them. IT is getting fun again. Smile…
What’s next?
I don’t know. You tell me.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Hi Ismael,
Commenting on the offline synchronization issue:
I’d like to point out that connectivity, i.e. access to the network, is only one (critical) aspect of availability. It is necessary, but absolutely not sufficient, as the service itself might be down for whatever reason. Last December, for instance, del.icio.us suffered from serious database corruptions, leaving many frustrated users without the ability to access their bookmarks. Even Gmail, which is deployed in one of the world’s most respected data centers, is suffering failures here and there. With a pressure on companies to release their products faster than ever before, we can assume that scalability and data availability will be somewhat compromised, at least in the early stages of a product life-cycle.
This is just to say that offline synchronization could well be a cost-effective solution to this problem, and that it shouldn’t be dismissed, even under a 100%, always-on network access.
Muli,
You’re making a good point. Nevertheless, I still believe that synchronization is too difficult a problem to solve, especially if you want to use multiple devices — desktops, laptops, mobile phone — and switch between them multiple times during a single day of work. The more devices you are using, the more people you share your data with, and the larger your dataset is, the more difficult the data synchronization problem becomes. What I am suggesting is that if you reduce your set of requirements for high connectivity or high availability, this problem simply disappears.
Well, you are making a good point too. Indeed, under the Service Mobility paradigm, the cost-effectiveness of offline synchronization is highly questionable.
“Individual users and Very Small Businesses (VSB).” Based on our data, I agree but might add one extension, which is Very Small Business Units (VSBU), or something similar. E.g., I know a team at Cisco that uses Zoho Sheet for collaboration on certain team projects. I suspect they would also use Zoho Show if it supported higher resolution and less degraded .PPT conversion. But that’s very far from the corporation itself of course adopting it from the middle or top down.
Where perhaps Office 2.0 has an opportunity then to escape VSB/VSBU in the ST is direct integration with existing workflows and solutions. For us, today that is about Salesforce.com integration. Interestingly to me Koral, which you highlight, has started here. In some ways though this is also at odds with the lightweight appeal of much of Office 2.0…
[…] As a follow on to my entry on the opening day of the Office 2.0 Conference, I thought I’d take a look at the challenges facing both Office 2.0 applications and the enterprises seeking to adopt 2.0 methodologies. For background, I recommend reading the post show analysis from IT|Redux, where Ismael Ghalimi presents a rundown of what occurred and offers worthwhile insights. […]
Ismael,
First of all, big applause for the outstanding success of the Office 2.0 Conference. Your summary of learnings at the Office 2.0 Conference is really the starting point and the direction where the next level of extended solutions from Office 2.0 vendors are headed toward. You indicated that Enterprise 2.0 = Office 2.0 + SOA (BPMS) in a previous article sometime ago. I am very much looking forward to seeing your next action and insight, as described in the Office 2.0 Jam by Sandy Kemsley and her presentation on Web 2.0 and BPM at Process 2006.
Regards
-Ismael
Office 2.0 Is Not Just About Collaboration…
Office 2.0 is not defined by social software, and its primary value proposition isn’t collaboration. That’s what I realized halfway through the Blitz Demos (David Terrar has a great synopsis of the presentations) at last week’s Office 2.0 Conference…
Office 2.0 Conference: the outcome…
The Office 2.0 conference, while lively, invigorating and interesting, left visitors with more questions than answers. The idea of Office 2.0 is simple enough: browser-delivered computer software. In practice, it is a can of worms. What, for example…
I did not actually attend the conference, but I have watched very closely all the developments, all the press it received, and the vigorous impact it made on the industry, developers and users alike.
What I learned about Office 2.0 in the last few months and about the conference in particular is that we owe a debt of gratitude to Ismael for the tremendous work he has accomplished in such a short period of time. The conference is no small part a testament to the vision and the will of one man who is determined to bring about a revolution on so many levels.
He is not alone, for sure, but he is one very active and powerful catalyst that is making tremendous change happen. Some people develop concepts and build applications, some people use and review them, and yet some people are revolutionary visionaries that shift the proverbial paradigm and put us in a different world than where we were in the not too distant past.
I count Ismael amongst the latter.
Good job — keep it going!
-Ryan
Ismael,
It truely was a well organized conference, and I’ve seen my share. I felt that the panel discussions often had a few pearls of knowledge to find. I’d suggest for next year that you have a set of more formal presentations vs the large panel majority. Andrew’s presentation on the first day was quite interesting, and I would have liked more. Don’t get me wrong, each of your panelists were very well prepared, I just would prefer a slight more balanced approach with panels and presentations.
Also, the demo blitz was very interesting. I’d suggest preparing the moderator a bit more before the start. And then sectioning the presenters into categories if at all possible. Otherwise, you end up comparing apples and oranges.
I look forward to next year’s conference!
Ryan,
Thanks for the kind words.
-Ismael
Vince,
Thanks for the feedback. I agree with all your points, and I can assure you that next year’s edition will address them to the fullest extent we can. Also, it would be great to have Oracle participate in a more active fashion then.
Best regards
-Ismael
Ismael,
You make a very good point about Oracle attending. I did submit my early registration, but I’ll go back and register as a presenter.
Top 4 Myths of Office 2.0…
During the Office 2.0 conference, the Enterprise Irregulars sat down with Charlene Li and G. Oliver Young of Forrester. It was an amazing session…
Office 2.0 — key takeaways…
I went to the Office 2.0 Conference last week. I thought the conference itself was well run; congrats to Ismael Ghalimi and Julia French for doing a superb job on the logistics…
Dear Ismael,
Thank you for mentioning Vyew, and I am glad to hear that you enjoyed the presentation. Please do consider using Vyew and I hope you will enjoy your experience with all the functions the program has to offer.
Ismael,
First kudos for the conference. It was great!
Second, I think it’s just a matter of time before the Office 2.0 applications will be able to work off-line. Even today, such a technology exists, and you save a version of your documents inside your browser (Flash can act as a local storage) and flush them to the server when it’s available. I haven’t seen any Office 2.0 product using that, but it’s just a matter of time…
Regards,
-Lenkov, SiteKreator.com
I am already looking forward to seeing post-conference artifacts, especially presentation slides to assist Office 2.0 evangelists! I feel quite strongly about the synchronization issue, as I have hit my share of hiccups sharing Office 2.0 technologies in Thailand. Office 2.0 has so much potential to bootstrap grassroot activist efforts, not to mention its ability to also help developing countries leapfrog team infrastructure.
I’ve been playing around with GTDTiddlyWiki for about a month now, and pleased to hear about ZiddlyWiki recently. It has a unique feature to export your TiddlyWiki, continue working on it, and synchronize back later. They have a sandbox, and I am eagerly awaiting a free Zope account to try out the synchronization feature fully.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who would like to start integrating synchronization technologies with one of the most basic primitives — wikis!
Office 2.0: Usability for the Common Man…
I recently attended the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. It was also attended by many of the who’s who in the Office 2.0, Web 2.0 and SaaS world, as well as industry veterans from Esther Dyson…
Ismael,
I wanted to add one more Office 2.0 application to your review list.
We have just launched our application called Uhuroo (the name comes from the word uhuru, which means freedom in swahili). Uhuroo is a collaborative Web research tool. The tool helps users to collect, organize, share (with individuals or groups), and consolidate interesting information from Web pages as part of various research initiatives.
Our goal is to enable people to do Research, and not re-search. It would be great if you could try out it and give us some feedback.
Thanks,
-Kaushal
Ismael:
I read a book from 37signals called “Getting Real.” It gives you insight on how these very succesful people think. While there are a lot of good concepts in the book, there are also some goofs (imho) that I attribute to background, and maybe the exuberance of youth.
There is a chapter (see below) entitled “Have an Enemy” in which they explain their desire to democratize applications and promote collaboration. To do that they pick an “enemy” or a model of what not to be. For project management software, they picked Microsoft Project and they decided to remove all charts, graphs, reports, etc. to liberate the project team from what they call the “Project Dictator”, and instead foster collaboration and communication.
It was their desire to create the “Anti-Project”, and I am afraid they succeeded. While I am all for collaboration, graphs, charts and reports are really needed for a project to be completed on scope, budget and schedule. This is exactly where I find their software woefully inadequate.
It is maybe that we define the term “project” in different ways, but I cannot see how you can run a project effectively without a Gantt chart, a critical path, financial reports, etc.
Without at least a very basic implementation of the above features, project management software is nothing but a collaborative approach to task management and to-do listing. Which incidentally is what I find their software to be.
It would be interesting to know what the good folks at 37signals use to manage their own projects, and how they stay on scope, budget, and schedule.
Just a thought,
-Ryan
“Have an Enemy. Pick a fight. Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn’t be. Figure out your app’s enemy and you’ll shine a light on where you need to go.
When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project.
We realized project management isn’t about charts, graphs, reports and statistics — it’s about communication. It also isn’t about a project manager sitting up high and broadcasting a project plan. It’s about everyone taking responsibility together to make the project work.
Our enemy was the Project Management Dictators and the tools they used to crack the whip. We wanted to democratize project management — make it something everyone was a part of (including the client). Projects turn out better when everyone takes collective ownership of the process.”
Ryan has a good grasp of what Project Management should be.
Every Office 2.0 Project Management package, in its current form, meets less 10% of the Project Management requirements as shown in PMI-PMBOK (Project Management Institute - Project Management Body of Knowlege). The 2000 edition of PMI-PMBOK was adopted by ANSI and IEEE as official Project Management standard. The 2000 edition of PMI-PMBOK is no longer available from PMI, but there is an extended copy downloadable from the Defense Acquistion University.
My experience with Office 2.0 packages is that they are still in the hyperware category, just out of vapourware category. In essence, they fall far short of matching any of the Office 1.0 capabilities. Collaboration and Groupware are nothing new. Microsoft’s Office SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus Note are all web-based now, and have more functionality than the current Office 2.0 packages! When one uses only the Mac platform, very few, if not none, collaboration and groupware packages are available, as Mac has less than 10% of the market share!
-Francis
Francis:
I do not want to seem like I’m going back on my earlier statements — I do love collaboration. I also do find that what people call a project varies quite considerably, and you are right in that there is no current Web 2.0 solution that covers PMBOK or Prince2 (that I know of).
At this point I would be willing to settle for an application with Web 2.0 capabilities that allows me to do WBS and Gantt charts, and allows data exchange with Microsoft Project (or similar) for more detailed analysis.
I actually manage programs or portfolios of projects, and I would love to have a dashboard of projects, so I can do PPM, and the tools for PM for individual projects.
Groove.net, now part of Microsoft Office 2007, does that fairly well thanks to software from Team Direction. However, it’s not as nimble as a Web 2.0 application, it relies on downloaded software, and it annoyingly loads up at start-up. Ray Ozzie — its originator — is now Microsoft’s CSO, so who knows which way the application is going — they are talking about tying into the Exchange Server, etc.
I want a browser based solution that allows me to summarize my projects in a dashboard, allows me to do WBS and Gantt charting, and simple status report (a la Earned Value). I know this is not asking for much, but I do not think developers and PM’s sat together and had a conversation over this.
I did try Zoho, and I have to say I am encouraged by the progress they’re making though. Patience and steady progress will win the day. In the meanwhile, I guess we’re free to contact the good people at Zoho, or Basecamp, etc. and suggest options and improvements per Ismael’s database.
Just my 2 cents.
Francis:
Check out Projity — let me know what you think.
Ryan:
Projity is a good Web-based “single” project management package, with all fundamental capabilities. I am not sure how well it would support your program and portfolio management. There are key components still missing. Requirements Management, Risk Management, and Configuration Management are prime examples. Moreover, I would not subscribe to a service if it did not support PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). Many government agencies and large corporations have put in place the PKI either internally or through subscription for user identification and authentication!
Francis
P.S. My experience with Zoho Virtual Office was largely negative! I downloaded and installed the package, and played with it. It works with FireFox 2 and IE6, but fails with IE7. It behaves very differently between FireFox 2 and IE6. In essence, it is not browser neutral — a rudimentary capability in both Web 2.0 and Office 2.0.
A little bit off-topic: one of my all-time favorite applications, JotSpot, got bought out by Google. JotSpot is a collaborative Wiki, and I just love it. Luckily, I got an account prior to the sale, but now I have to wait to upgrade to secure service and unlimited users. Services are free now as part of the Google family, and I can’t wait to see what Google is going to do with it.
It has so much potential…
Where are you Ismael? You have disappeared…
I’m still there. Just gathering my thoughts following the Office 2.0 Conference. Looking forward to the next wave. Regular posting should resume very soon.
[…] I see another key trend converging with the ECM market in the form of Office 2.0. I recently attended the hugely positive Office 2.0 conference organized by Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. In his wrap up blog post, Ismael refined his definition of Office 2.0 as follows: […]
Ismael,
FYI, here is an interesting article:
Salesforce.com plans to add Office 2.0 applications to its AppExchange
Just wondering if you are doing somethjing behind the scene.
Regards
[…] Even the Kool-Aid sellers are realistic. Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of open-source business process management software vendor Intalio and organizer of the Office 2.0 Conference, admitted. “Office 2.0 is not ready for the enterprise, and it’s a good thing. Trying to make Office 2.0 work for the enterprise today will strip the concept of all the good things that make it interesting. The enterprise needs reliability, scalability and security, and such attributes take some time to implement. On the other hand, individual users and Very Small Businesses — defined by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs as concerns that have 15 or fewer employees with average annual receipts that do not exceed $1 million — are more concerned by cost, convenience, and collaboration. In that respect, Office 2.0 is perfect for them, and almost ready for prime time.” […]
[…] If we believe Gartner, Total Cost of Ownership for a business class desktop is about $5,000 per year. Over a four-year period, that’s a whopping $20,000. Within large corporations, a disproportionate amount of IT budgets is spent on support and maintenance—up to 90%, to which desktop maintenance is no small contributor. Some CIOs are starting to have issues with such a picture, and are becoming quite creative in coming up with solutions that might significalty accelerate the adoption of Office 2.0 alternatives within the corporate world, much faster than I originally envisioned. […]
[…] The downside of synchronization is that it’s difficult. As Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalmi wrote in a post wrapping up his Office 2.0 Conference: Within five years, anyone who will need or want to be connected will, anywhere in the world, at anytime, and at virtually no cost. If you do not believe me, try developing synchronization software that works, and let’s see who gets there first. […]
[…] So where are we? Performance issues, overload of patches, need to become one’s IT support: these are all signs of a failed model: installing and updating software on the desktop. Businesses are increasingly recognizing this and are turning to SaaS, and I feel we’ve reached the threshold where it will become more and more attractive for individual users, too. I’m not a religious SaaS believer though. It’s nice to see even the absolute Office 2.0 proponents to have come around and realize the importance of offline access. Seamless computing for a while will require online/offline access. […]
[…] In case you don’t know it yet, the second Office 2.0 Conference, organised by Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux, is not only a conference to explore the future of online productivity and collaboration but also an annual gathering for Office 2.0 folks to meet, learn and have fun. The conference line-up is impressive. It follows the tantalising success of the first Office 2.0 Conference. Follow the buzz here. […]
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