SubscribeWhy Work 2.0 is Coming Closer and How You Can Benefit From It As a Startup
Published by cornelius on Monday, October 1st, 2007 in Entrepreneurship, Technology.Call it Work 2.0, Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 or whatever, at least we should be aware of the fact that we are facing interesting times with regards to web-based office and project-management products. There are many headlines in the last time about new announcements of products and alliances in this space. Zimbra’s Office Suite bought by Yahoo, Google launched its long-awaited presentation software, the system integrator CapGemini is promoting Google Documents for enterprise usage, Adobe buying the uber-cool Buzzword online word-processor, just to name some examples.
Many people only know Microsoft Office which is kind of sad and demonstrates the de-facto Microsoft monopoly in this space. There are obvious advantages (and disadvantages) of using web-based office products like Google Documents. Ever received 10 revisions of the same document via e-mail? Sending always a copy of a file to your team members is inefficient and leads to an unproductive and unorganized work-flow. In one of my projects we just share links or work simultaneously on the same document which is great and simplifies the whole process of collaboration and information sharing.
I think all the new web-based office product won’t rival Microsoft Office for a while, especially not in slow-adapting large enterprises with high switching costs but if you are working in a small company, a startup, or you work as part of a distributed virtual team, these applications can give you a productivity increase and it is just nicer to work with them instead of the old-fashioned Microsoft Office or Open Office products. But it is also a trade-off between feature complexity and collaboration simplicity that you are facing. If you rely on the scripting functionality of Excel you should stay with it because no web-based software provides these capabilities. Of course, privacy, security and reliability plays an important role while using web-based applications but in many cases the advantages outplay the disadvantages.
There are also more and more very good web-based project-management tools, that have fair prices and allow easy collaboration with team members and clients. For example, Copper Project or Basecamp.
Personally, I share around 30 Google documents and spreadsheets with 22 persons, mainly from group work in my classes. Worked out pretty well so far and saved me a lot of pain. Give it a try.
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October 1st, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Another side note, compare the usability of the word processer you see in the video to other office products. That’s innovation where it is needed.
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:10 pm
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