Office 2.0 Conference: Dyson Keynote

"If Office 2.0 is going to be successful, it's not going to be because it makes word processing more fun."

Futurist/tech pundit Esther Dyson is kicking off the Office 2.0 conference, in a conversation with ZDNet's Dan Farber, and she's being bracingly and appropriately contrarian, pointing out that doing all your productivity in a purely Web-based fashion makes no sense at all unless connectivity gets a lot better than it is today.

She says that as far as she's concerned, Office 2.0 (the concept, not the conference) isn't so much about Web-based word processing and spreadsheets as it is about a new task-based approach to productivity, one that incorporates stuff like word processing and spreadsheets but is organized around projects and processes rather than documents. And she says that in a world of sporadic connectivity and data security concerns, it makes sense for it to be a hybrid of traditional software/local storage and Web service/remote storage.

Nobody out there is offering a fully-baked expression of what Dyson is talking about, but she points to some of the things that IBM is doing as heading in the right direction, and says that the work of Ray Ozzie (Lotus Notes, Groove), who's now Microsoft's chief software architect, hints at what she's talking about.

She also points out that a lot of the startups who are building interesting Web services think that a venture capitalist will come along and tell them what their business models is, whereas venture capitalists like to work with companies that already have figured out how to make money. End result: An awfully high percentage of the Office 2.0 services out there will go away, sooner or later.

One of the things about phrases like Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 that's equally fun and frustrating is that every smart person has a slightly (or radically) different definition of what they mean. So Dyson--who says that she's currently an Office 0.8 type of person herself--isn't the last word here. But I haven't heard anyone discuss this stuff more realistically and intelligently than Dyson...

Comments

Post a comment Post a comment

0 / 1000 max characters