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?
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)