Day 1.0 of Office 2.0 conference

Before getting into specific posts about the Office 2.0 conference, here are some broad thoughts about the first day.

Ismael Ghalimi from IT|Redux and Socialtext's Julia French put in masses of work organising the conference, including the dishing out of iPods for all delegates. This contained the conference programme which many of us promptly destroyed by plugging the iPods into our PCs. By the time Ghalimi warned of the problems, it was already too late for many of us.

One thing became clear early on and that is that Office 2.0 applications, including their close relatives from Enterprise 2.0, are not going to replace regular office applications any time soon. Too many issues mitigate against them. Professor Andrew McAfee nailed it when he said that, for an application to displace an incumbent, it would need to be ten times better.

He cited John Gourville for this insight. Fundamentally, we put an artificially high value on what we curently use and a correspondingly low value on what is being proposed as a replacement. Multiply the two factors together - for email versus collaboration software, for example - and you hit a factor of nine. Hence the 'ten times better' to be sure of a move.

Many of the speakers and demonstrators were up front about the fact that, in terms of functionality, their programs were not yet a match for today's powerful desktop products. However, they do exist as low cost browser-only products with rapid development cycles based on user feedback, rather than long development cycles and technology-led developments.

Speakers talked, and sometimes argued, that coexistence with existing office applications was better than replacement. The fault lines in the Office 2.0 world started to become apparent. But opportunities started to emerge as well. I'll examine some of these in my next post.