My overall impression of the first Office 2.0 conference is that we are at the genesis of something very important for business and IT, as significant as when the IBM PC was announced in the 80s, but that the conference suffered from the category being at such an early stage. There was some good content, some not so good, but a lack of direction, and very definitely a lack of any controversy. I have to say that Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux, and Julia French of SocialText did a fantastic job of organising the conference, getting good speakers, sponsors and contributors onboard, and making sure the conference logistics went smoothly. My thanks to them!
One of the disappointing threads through the conference was the quality of the panel discussions. The majority of the panellists involved were good quality people, with good things to say, but there seemed to be an overall lack of direction, and much too much repetition. It felt to me as if some of the moderators had done little preparation, or hadn’t listened to any of the prior panel sessions themselves. The exceptions to this were the VC panel co-chaired by my fellow Enterprise Irregulars Neil Robertson and Jason Wood, and the business session moderated by Stowe Boyd. Actually, I’m surprised to hear myself say that Stowe did a good job, as I don’t agree with some of his opinions, and I expected his approach to be too consumer oriented. Stowe had already posted a great rant on the panel topic before he stood up, and he went on to steer his panel well, creating some tension and controversy along the way.One of the problems with the panels was that they tended to cover the same ground, with the conference groping towards a better definition of Office 2.0 itself. One was titled “Office 2.0, Where Are We?”, moderated by Om Malik, including Ismael Ghalimi, Shel Israel, Karen Leavitt, Rajen Sheth, Mark Suster. Some of the comments included:
“Office 2.0 is more about collaboration.”
“Office 2.0 is about interaction and taking action, not just the transaction. The real promise of office 2.0 is the confluence.”
Hey, that last word would be a good name for a product! In the opening session Esther Dyson had said:
“Office 2.0 needs to be more than putting spreadsheets online so that they can be shared.”
So Office 2.0 is much more than just trying to replace the Microsoft desktop applications that most of us use with web based equivalents. When I shift the office functionality to the web I get immediate benefits of ease of access from anywhere, the ability to collaborate on content creation and share information with my team, my customers or my partners, and I remove an IT management headache which becomes my service provider’s problem. Office 2.0 need to be more about the kinds of collaboration tools that will emerge to help us all be more productive. Today, between the standard, operational business applications (accounts, ERP, supply chain, order management, whatever) that we use, most businesses develop ad-hoc, semi-automated systems that are most often based on Excel spreadsheets and e-mail. Office 2.0 should be about providing better tools for handling these business processes in a more robust way, which avoid the kinds of problems that we have to live with from the old approach. Have I got the latest version of the spreadsheet? Where the hell did I file that attachment? Why was I missed off the circulation list? 
When I look through the many products and web services that I saw over the 2 days, there were some great products which I will definitely start to use myself, or recommend to my customers. Things like Freshbooks for invoicing, or Wufoo for adding forms to my website, or SiteKreator to help build websites. Interestingly, very few of the products seemed to incorporate a workflow component to help me integrate them in to my procedures. There was a very diverse and disparate collection, and you can see that over the next 5 years, some of these products will fail, some will coalesce in to online office suites, and some will carve out a “best of breed” niche doing a particular part of the business process very well, easily integrating with more generic business and office applications.In a panel titled “Making the transition to Office 2.0″, Bob Sutor of IBM said one of the most important things about the conference. He commented:
“The conference hasn’t mentioned verticals, hasn’t mentioned education, or how are we are going to get these technologies adopted by universities?”
For me that hits the nail on the head for the missing component at this conference. The majority of the discussions were about the features, functions and characteristics of the tools on offer, as well as the barriers to adoption by the various communities in the enterprise. It was mostly vendors and analysts talking to vendors and analysts and VCs about the software business, rather than talking about the business of what the software does. There was very little about real customer case studies and examples, and hardly any mention of vertical application areas where these tools can be put to use. In pure marketing terms, that’s what many of the vendors should be doing. Even if they are adopting a self service, consumer style approach to distributing and supporting their product, they should not be following suit with their marketing. They should be following the successful path of so many software authors, encapsulated in Geoffrey Moore’s Inside the Tornado, or Dealing with Darwin, and targeting niche, vertical markets, getting strong in them and then moving on to the next vertical (with World domination as the eventual goal, but in small steps!). This was voiced by Eric Hoffert, the CEO of ShareMethods who asked the panel “What are the 5 vertical apps we should be targeting” and went on to use Apple as an example with their early focus on the design and desktop publishing market.
There are two other themes that I bring away from the conference. The first, which I’ve mentioned previously, is that Office 2.0 tools have to cater for a hybrid approach so that I can continue to work off-line, for those times when I’m away from my permanent connection because I am on a plane, or working in the field somewhere with poor infrastructure like Malawi. It seemed that, during the conference, everyone accepted this, but very few of the products have this implemented in any way today.
The second is that, although there was a lot of talk about the Enterprise adopting Office 2.0 solutions, the real opportunity for the vendors is the SME/SMB market. In one of the questions to that same “Transition” panel somebody suggested that the Greenfield opportunity was the upcoming MySpace generation who aren’t tied to e-mail, and the 28 million small businesses with 10 employees or less. This is another example where web 2.0 will be more help addressing the long tail of the market, whereas the larger enterprise continues to struggle with adopting these types of tools and concepts.
The conference was absolutely great for networking and meeting people, and I’m sure Ismael will have loads of help and suggestions to make next year’s show even better.
p.s. My thanks to Brian Solis and Dan Farber for their public O20 photographs on Flickr used above.
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