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Who is living the Office 2.0 dream?

Who is living the Office 2.0 dream?

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman
2 min read

GigaOm blogger Om Malik is asking the people on his panel, "Office 2.0: Where Are We?" where they are on the Office 2.0 scale. Are they old-school Office 1.0 (PC-based apps) users, or all-online, Office 2.0 gurus?

Ismael Ghalimi, the conference organizer, says he's at Office 1.95. The Web let him down when he had to print conference badges.

Karen Leavitt, of WebEx, who says her company is the 800-pound gorilla of Web 2.0, says she's at Office 1.73.

Mark Suster is CEO of Koral, a content collaboration company. He's at 1.75. And he points out that people around the world work very differently. The way we do things in California is very different from the way workers in Europe, Asia, or Wisconsin do. That's a really important point.

Rajen Sheth, of Google, is trying to bring Google technologies to business. He says he's at 1.9999. That's interesting, since I think Google office apps still have a long way to go. Plus he still uses Outlook. Rajen, if you believe, take the plunge!

Suster points out that, in business, there are big issues associated with adopting Web 2.0 products, since they don't offer companies as much control as they're used to having. This is an ongoing argument, actually--the PC blew up the "glass house" of business computing. Web-based products are just continuing this creative destruction.

Sheth and Malik are big proponents of Web-based tools, since they make globally distributed workgroups effective. Plus, Malik says, when people are not all crammed together in a central office: "No politics."

A very smart aside from Israel: "The killer app is online recruiting." How true, since the next generation of workers is already online in ways that we old fogys are not. The Work 1.0-style resume may be dead.

Me, although I write about Web-based applications all the time, I confess that I'm probably at Office 1.25. I still use Microsoft Word and Outlook, and I store all my files on my local hard disk. I use Web tools for collaboration, and I am eager to move to Office 2.0 apps, but it's hard to break my old habits.

Where are you on the Office 2.0 scale?