The Future Workplace of Office 2.0
Everyone's new favorite buzzword is Office 2.0. This term, while it may seem quite nebulous out of the gate, actually points to a revolutionary way of thinking about applications and software.
Office tools are moving off of the desktop and onto the web. Platform questions like "Mac OS, Windows or Linux?" are meaning less and less as it becomes increasingly easier to perform all kinds of office productivity tasks on hosted applications from within the browser.
Nick Carr's essay on this topic, which he posted today, is a must read.
"Compose, share, collaborate," is the Office 2.0 mantra. The big players in the space are Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, all of which are working on suites of products that will allow business colleagues to collaborate on documents, calendars and task lists without leaving their web browsers. Google, who own Writely and are dominating web-based email, recently announced Google Apps for Your Domain, which we reported. Microsoft is building web-based, collaborative tools into its next version of Office. Yahoo's beta launch yesterday of their new hosted email app hints at collaborative features still to come. Then there's Zoho Virtual Office, the popular and robust productivity suite, and many more. Apple is largely absent from the scene, but office tools have never really been their game. They'll likely stick to what they do best: consumer desktop apps.
Is this the future of office software? Anil Dash disagrees with the notion that Microsoft is even the slightest bit worried that the Fortune 500 will stop using MS Office desktop products. But Carr points out that office tools have been slowly and steadily been shifting onto the web since the beginning. And, as Dan Farber correctly notes, "Microsoft is not clueless."
[Photo by blind_justice via Flickr]
