Obviously, I am a big fan of the concept for Office 2.0, but as with any new idea, many are quick to point to where it falls short and why it won’t work. Well, let me side with those guys for a minute and preempt their arguments, because to a large extent, they have very valid points that are worth paying attention to. The sooner we do, the sooner we can fix things, and the sooner we can prove those naysayers wrong. So let’s make a list of bugs that are currently plaguing Office 2.0, and let’s revisit them every quarter to see how much progress we are making toward the original vision.

Office 2.0 does not work when you’re offline
As mentioned before, this one won’t be solved, because it should not. Offline Office 2.0 is an oxymoron, so forget about it, and find ways to remain online most of the time instead. For me, that currently means looking for a good wireless modem card that I could stick into my PowerBook’s PCCARD slot.

Most Office 2.0 services do not have sufficient APIs
Let’s face it, when it comes to offering public APIs, most Web 2.0 applications should be dubbed Web 1.5, or even Web 1.1. Salesforce.com certainly is an exception to that rule, but most services I currently use need better interfaces: Gmail should add POP access to external email accounts, LinkedIn should offer a public API for sending invitations and querying one’s list of connections, and Simpy should add a JavaScript interface similar to del.icio.us’ Linkrools. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. APIs for single sign-on, data backup and advanced content sharing and syndication are needed, and they are nowhere in sight right now. This is where most of the work has to be done, and the first step is in convincing service providers that APIs are a good thing. If there is was thing they should learn from Google’s success, that could very well be it.

There is no good enough Office 2.0 alternative to Desktop
As Michael Arlington recently pointed out on TechCrunch, there is not a month that passes by without one or two new AJAX home page services being released. eskobo, Favoor, Google, HomePortals, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, Windows Live, Zoozio, make your pick! Problem is, most of them don’t really bring much value beyond showing your emails and preferred RSS feeds onto one page. So far, opening multiples tabs in my web browser seems to be working well enough. Once better APIs become available for most of the services I use and some AJAX home page services start providing intuitive wizards for them, I might change my mind, but until then, I do not use any home page other than the one I get with Salesforce.com and I extend it using custom dashboards and FeedDigest feeds.

Office 2.0 word processors cannot import complex Microsoft Word documents
To be more precise, they can import most documents, but they won’t necessarily display them in an unaltered fashion. The one I use — Zoho Writer — does a much better job than Gmail’s ‘View as HTML’ feature, but it isn’t enough if you need to modify documents that have been created using a lot of Microsoft Word’s fancy features. Now, the good news is that when you export the document back to Word, everything that was in the original document but could not be properly displayed in Zoho Writer still is there. Somehow, Zoho Writer is preserving the original Word document, and that one thing is what makes the end-to-end workflow actually work. If there was one reason why Office 2.0 is working today, that would be it.

There is no good enough Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint
As covered in this previous article, Office 2.0 alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint are at the pre-alpha prototype stage right now. That’s the bad news. The good news is that several companies are working on it and the challenge is an order of magnitude simpler than developing a working spreadhseet editor in AJAX, therefore I would expect this bug to be fixed sometime in the first half of 2006.

Office 2.0 spreadsheet editors do not support Microsoft Excel macros
The upcoming Zoho Websheet is one of the greatest tools since Gmail, but it does not support macros yet. Unless you’re using a spreadsheet for building grocery shoping lists, macros are a must-have. Let’s hope that the good folks at AdventNet — the Zoho people — are working on it.

There is no good enough Office 2.0 alternative to Adobe Photoshop or iTunes
Office 2.0 is called that way rather than PC 2.0 for good reasons. Not everything one does with a personal computer can be done online… yet. Any CPU-intensive application that requires real-time interactions with end users will be very hard to migrate online, therefore PC 2.0 is a long way off, but Office 2.0 is getting real, so there is no reason why you should not take advantage of it today. Also, as discussed in this previous article, we might actually find a way to make iTunes Office 2.0 compliant. So stay tuned! [Pun intended]

[Updated on February 4, 2006] PXN8 is no Photoshop, yet a very good start.

[Updated on April 20, 2006] ajaxTunes is as cool as it gets!

Salesforce.com is too expensive for most individual users
Several readers of this column complained that most of my Office 2.0 setup revolves around Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition, which at $125 a month is not exactly what they would call affordable. As much as I agree with them, I still believe that Salesforce.com is a fantastic tool worth every penny I am spending on it, and I believe that very many early adopters for the Office 2.0 concepts would benefit from using it and could justify the investment. This tells me that I should build some kind of RoI calculator for the personal use of Salesforce.com. I’ll keep you posted on this one.

Storage quotas are too low
Today, you can find a quarter-terabyte hard drive for $75. That’s 30 cents a gigabyte. With that in mind, the 2.866 GB quota I have with Gmail today seems kinda ridiculous. That’s less than 86 cents! There are ways to work around it, but I would rather not have to worry about it and pay whatever subscription that would give me a terabyte of secure storage online. Rumors have been circulating that Apple might soon offer terabyte .Mac accounts, and Google is the kind of company that thrives on bold challenges like that, so I remain confident that this bug might be fixed before the end of the year.

DreamTeam needs a browser plugin
I like DreamTeam because it gives me Gantt charts in Salesforce.com, but I would rather have an AJAX interface instead of the funky DreamFactory plugin technology. A couple of years ago, I built a project management spreadsheet with Microsoft Excel that sported a Gantt chart interface. It made extensive use of macros, so I will try to run it into Zoho Websheet as soon as AdventNet comes up with a version that supports them.

Flickr does not support the RAW file format
Flickr certainly is the best tool to manage pictures online, but it does not support the upload of native RAW images yet, which makes the overall workflow slightly more complex than it should be. I would expect this limitation to be adressed soon, but if it does not, someone should come up with an online picture processing service that would provide a RAW image upload interface into Flickr or its closest match today, 23.

Simpy does not work in real time
Most social bookmarking tools have the same problem: they cannot sustain the growth of their user base and have to work in batch mode. What this means is that if you update your bookmarks stored in del.ico.us, changes might be reflected only 24 hours later. Similar problems plague Simpy and FeedDigest, which makes service cascading less reliable than it could be. Nevertheless, both services are currently being improved and I would expect these problems to be resolved no later than in the second half of 2006.

Service cascading slows everything down
The more services are involved to perform a certain task, the slower you’re likely to get your task done. This problem can be easily demonstrated when cascading a social bookmarking tool such as Simpy with a feed processing service like FeedDigest. Caching would help accelerate things up but leads to outdated information being served in some instances. It seems to me that there will be an opportunity at creating the Akamai of service syndication.

Office 2.0 does not support single sign-on
The more services you use to get your work done, the more passwords you have to manage and the more time you have to spend typing them every day. My current Office 2.0 setup includes 14 different services, 10 require a login and password, and 8 separate logins and passwords are used. Clearly, we need a better version of Microsoft Passport. Nevertheless, using multiple services with different logins and passwords also limits the risk of identity theft, which certainly increases the more activities get performed online. Therefore, this problem is a complex one and I am not convinced that it could be solved without significant infrastructure changes, such as the mainstream adoption of biometric identification devices. In the meantime, multiple sign-on is not such a bad idea.

[Updated on March 19, 2006] SXIP provides the first SSO solution for Office 2.0.

Office 2.0 does not support custom branding [Added on February 12, 2006]
Granted, most services will let you put your logo somewhere on the screen, and change fonts and colors here and there, but beyond that, service branding remains a luxury that most of us cannot afford. The first issue to be solved is with domain names, as described in this article. Services should be offered through an organization’s own domain name, instead of a generic one. For example, I would like to use Basecamp through a URL that looks like projects.itredux.com, instead of the backward itredux.projectpath.com. Google has started to address this issue, therefore I expect it to be fixed for most services before year’s end.

Office 2.0 does not provide a consistent UI [Added on February 12, 2006]
Eventhough I would like to get advanced branding for the services I use, I also want them to provide consistent user interfaces. Today, the Gmail user interface could not be more different than the one sported by Salesforce.com, and this creates cognitive friction that significantly reduces one’s productivity. One of the most important features offered by desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS is the consistency of user interfaces provided by applications that run on top of them. Such consistency is nowhere to be found on the web today, first because no user interface framework managed to establish itself as a standard, second because design guidelines are not defined, nor widely adopted. Frameworks such as OpenAJAX are an attempt at addressing this issue, but I doubt that they will have significant traction before some time, mainly because so much is at stake: he who owns the AJAX framework ends up owning Office 2.0, much like Microsoft owning Microsoft Windows and the community of 8 million Visual Basic developers significantly contributed to make Microsoft Office the standard office productivity tool. In the meantime, developers of Office 2.0 services should adopt common guidelines and design principles, making tools like WordPress look a little bit like 30 Boxes, even though they’ve been developed by different companies, using different technologies.

Document sharing looks like spam [Added on February 21, 2006]
Document sharing as described in this article works by sending an email to the person you want to share a document with, and that email can get canned by a spam filter, or simply ignored by people who are not familiar with the mechanism. This problem, as well as a couple of possible workarounds, have been documented in this article.

Online services can go down [Added on February 22, 2006]
As illustrated by Salesforce.com’s repetitive service disruptions, an online service can go down. Ensuring the right level of quality of service for a large user base is no simple task, and only time will tell whether or not mission critical applications can be served that way to a very large audience. In the meantime, displaying service performance history, as Salesforce.com does with trust.salesforce.com, is a good way to manage customer expectations. I hope that most service providers will adopt similar communication practices this year.

Office 2.0 does not support remote data storage [Added on February 24, 2006]
A public API for remote data storage would enable separation of duty between data storage services and data editing services, as described in this article. WebDAV could be used for document-centric data, but a new API is needed for relational data.

Office 2.0 does not support copy and paste [Added on March 25, 2006]
If you are developing a spreadsheet with Zohosheet, there is no way to copy and paste it into a Writely document, or even a Zoho Writer document for that matter. Ray Ozzie at Microsoft has been working on a universal clipboard, but until enough Office 2.0 applications support it, it remains a proof of concept, not a working fix to the bug. This problem has been documented in this article.

There is no accounting solution for Office 2.0 [Added on March 31, 2006]
QuickBooks Online Edition is great, but it only works with Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows. Intacct for Salesforce.com would be a good alternative, but at $400 per month for two users, it’s not exactly cheap. Something more than a simple spreadsheet editor is much needed for serious accounting work. This problem has been documented in this article.

Office 2.0 databases do not provide complete feeds [Added on April 9, 2006]
Office 2.0 databases such as Dabble DB do not provide complete XML feeds for the data they store, and most of the data gets stuffed into a single ‘Description’ field within RSS feeds. This makes data repurposing virtually impossible without complex parsing. This problem has been documented in this article.

Over time, this list of bugs will grow. I expect original bugs to be fixed, but new ones will emerge, as more and more activities will be supported online by more and more services that offer more and more complex capabilities. I will do my best to keep track of the most relevant ones, and outline practical solutions to work around them. Please feel free to send me your must annoying bugs and the solutions you came up with.