I’m participating in the Radar
Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the
upcoming Office 2.0
event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this
post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this week.
The big news of course was Google
releasing a Premier Edition of its Google
Apps suite of office tools. The new-look suite includes the existing Google Apps
tools – Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page – plus
Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a set of APIs and third party services, and a solid
support and hosting package. We covered this on
Read/WriteWeb, noting that it still falls short of a full office suite –
missing is presentations, CRM, JotSpot(!) and other things. Also lacking is full
integration and collaboration between the apps, a la Basecamp or Central Desktop. So
Google Apps is a step forward, but by no means the final deal.
I was interested to read Zoho’s reaction to this – as Zoho is one of the
small startups with its own office suite. In their blog they wrote that its aim is to be a best-of-breed solution that gets a nice
little slice of the market:
“Our business plan is not based on us beating Microsoft or Google, it is based
on serving customers well enough to earn a profitable share of the market. Business is
not superbowl, though it often appears that way in a 24×7 news cycle.”
Not
everyone wanted to write about Google Apps this week 😉 Also check out Between The
Lines’ post, which warns us to read the fine
print of Google Office.
Two in-depth office 20 articles this week worth checking out are: Dion
Hinchcliffe’s Tracking the DIY
phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets and Rod Boothby’s article about
the
recombinatorial web.
And two blogs that are doing a good job of covering office 2.0 startups are Rafe
Needleman’s CNET blog Webware and Ismael
Ghalimi’s IT|Redux. Catching my eye on
Webware this week was Yackpack, a messaging tool
“that lets you chat live as a group or swap recorded messages to group members, all
within your Web browser”. Also check out Ismael’s Desktop Roundup, which
profiles “16 online desktop applications, from Clic!Dev to YourMinis”.
Any other office 2.0 news or apps that got your attention this week?
