10
October
2006
|
19:21 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Here comes Office 2.0 . . .



This is an interesting conference put on by Ismael Ghalimi at the swank St Regis. I popped into the Tuesday evening reception  at SF MOMA.


Conference goers got their badges, and their digital schedules on a flash drive - an Apple iPod Nano - very classy.


I got to catch up with Steve Gilmor, my fellow ZDNet blogger, David Tebbutt, and also, Robert Scoble's boss, John Furrier, founder of PodTech was there.


Plus a bunch of pals made it, Chris Heuer, Jeremy Pepper, Brian Solis, Uwe Maurer, and I met many others. This type of event is good because you can get to chat and get to know people.


Office 2.0 is a space that holds much more promise than "Web 2.0" because Office 2.0 is displacing a business model. Much of the Web 2.0 applications out there are not displacing anything, they are seeking new(ish) business models.


Office 2.0 is about offering business productivity as a service rather than as a download. Will corporations allow such activities outside of their firewalls?


They probably don't have any choice about it. I heard one story Tuesday evening about a company that had finished a long SAP installation but their internal departments and other users, refused to switch from Salesforce. So they dumped SAP.


Today's model for growing software sales is: make the software development cheap enough so that departments can pay for it out of their budgets, without having to beg their colleagues in IT. 


Individuals can expense it and it is that kind of viral marketing that works great.


More on  that tomorrow...