Office 2.0: Someone's gotta pay

I'm at the Office 2.0 conference (more) listening to the organizer, Ismael Ghalimi, discuss his pure Web 2.0 philosophy for setting up the conference: No local software, no files stored on PCs, no paper at all. At this conference, Ismael is even hoping that a special iPhone-friendly Web site set up for attendees will obviate the need for business card exchange (this is so not going to happen, but it's a good experiment).

Supporting the 600 attendees, nearly all of whom are spending time heads-down in either a Wi-Fi laptop or their conference-provided iPhones, there's a serious network infrastructure. I counted 20 Swisscom-provided pole-mounted Wi-Fi repeaters in the main ballroom alone. Kind of frightening. And it reminds us that Office 2.0 isn't free or easy. Just because a PC may not be storing data or processing its own applications, the infrastructure has got to run somewhere. Remember this if you're thinking about moving your business over to Web 2.0.