I’m just reflecting on the first day of the Office 2.0 conference, which has been excellent for networking, meeting my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, and lot’s of interesting vendors, but the presentations and panels have been a bit of a curate’s egg - good in parts. The overall impression is that the concept of replacing the traditional desktop office suite with tools and services that are available “in the cloud” has made an exciting start, but we have a long way to go. At one point Andrew McAfee paraphrased Churchill’s quote “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” but added that for O20 we are not at the end of the beginning yet. Ismael Ghalimi has done an impressive job of pulling this conference together inside 3 months, and has tried to do things differently at every stage. As an example, there wasn’t the usual ad emblazoned conference bag as a giveaway, but a delightful, silver iPod Nano which had the conference schedule in its calendar, all of the speakers described in contacts, as well containing all of their photos - now this is the epitome of the Office 2.0 way of doing things.
Major vendors like Google and Webex are involved, and SAP , IBM and Microsoft lead the attendance list with 10, 8 and 7 respectively. I haven’t seen any involvement from Salesforce.com, because this show conflicts with their DreamForce show happening elsewhere in San Francisco, and Microsoft are notably absent. There are a plethora of vendors and startups showing their wares, along with the wannabe office 2.0 suite vendors like Zoho and Thinkfree.
On Microsoft, in the conference opening interview, Esther Dyson the editor of CNET, commented that:
“You don’t dislodge the leader by doing something better, but you dislodge them by changing the game”.
There were plenty of examples of the kind of collaboration and communication that will be the ingredients that move knowledge workers from desktop software to browser based equivalents, but both Neil Robertson and Rod Boothby reminded me between sessions not to discount Microsoft. Neil in particular suggested that version 3.0 of Sharepoint Services was going to be significant, with it’s added function, wiki and blog capability, and that Windows Live already did many of the things we were seeing at the show from smaller vendors. I need to find out more about what’s coming from Microsoft, and I’m sure that they will be a major contributor to next year’s version of this show. Esther also highlighted that the web 2.0 environment helps mitigate the disadvantage of being a small company when you can sell your wares on eBay, and do your marketing through Google AdWords, but that these tools are less help to major corporations. That phenomenon was reflected by the diversity of smaller software authors at the conference. Many of the presentations and discussions highlighted the barriers to adoption of this technology including trusting your company data to the cloud, the small size of some of the vendors, the lack of integration between services, the user interface being a less rich experience compared to the desktop tools I’m used to, or the general lack of ease of use. I liked one thing she said when she compared the free form lack of structure of wikis to arranging the chairs in a meeting room. Without somebody to make sure the chairs are there, and arranged properly, you’re not going to have a good meeting. Exactly this phenomenon occurs in many wiki implementations, where you are presented with the equivalent of an empty room and the average user doesn’t know what to do or where to go. Somebody needs to take responsibility for “arranging the chairs”, adding some structure, navigation and explanation so that user doesn’t get lost, and give up on contributing.
The other common thread of this first day has been the lack of ability that most vendors here have to demonstrate their products properly, either in the main conference, or at the many demo pods arranged in the conference foyer. When Google showed their rebranded Google Docs and Google Speadsheet, although I couldn’t see much new function over the previous version, they presented what they had well. I had a very good demonstration of a very promising workflow product called CogHead, but most of the other demos I saw were poor. Few had an initial “elevator pitch” to explain the basics, or good examples to bring their products to life. I’m sure they’ll be lots of missed opportunities as a result.
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