Collaboration Is Where Web Office Will Shine

ZDNet on November 01, 2006

In this blog post, Phil Windley contends that Web tools won't succeed by trying to imitate their offline counterparts with tasks like word processing and spreadsheets. Rather, they will succeed by introducing tools that facilitate collaboration. Sure, Microsoft has Exchange and SharePoint. But those tools were "built for the enterprise world that existed 10 years ago," Windley says. They cannot duplicate his recent experience of using Google Docs to collaboratively edit a document with a colleague in another city as they spoke over the phone. As a historical precedent, he offers the example of the PC and the minicomputer. The PC displaced the minicomputer not by refining how it performed tasks, but by creating a whole new set of more useful tasks.