Wicked Strategery

I've been reading a lot lately on online office solutions. The likes of Writely, CalendarHub, and Basecamp just to name a few.

It's certainly a natural path for the Web 2.0 to follow. Office productivity I mean. In fact, Microsoft has gotten into the arena with its Office Live offering. Wtih all of the development going on, we should see some very nice offerings, not to say what is out there now is bad. With any sort of tool that can be marketed to businesses, the question is not just of features but of longevity. If any business is going to rely on one of these services, what happens when it is no longer supports nor available for use?

The next step in the progression will be the office suite, much like Zimbra and Zoho. It brings together email, calendaring, and authoring in a one-stop shop. And it does it well (as far as I can see from the screenshots anyways). Even Google may be headed that way, at least with webpage creation. (Michael O'Conner seems to think Google will be offering a collaborative version of the Page Creator!)

In all of these offerings, we do see a couple trends developing. First is a clean, simple user-interface, and the second is incremental upgrades. The user-interface, which I've touched on before, is critical. Many of these follow the KISS principle, and turn the learning curve into more of a gentle slope. The incremental updates are another good thing as well. It is a lot easier for a user to learn one or two new things at once, than a whole lot of new features. Plus you get the additional buzz from a user being excited about something they discovered. The only downside to this is that the calendars currently available are nice, but seem to have a "built to flip" flavor about them.

Only time will tell who will come out on top. It's an exciting direction to move in, and I (like many) are just a little skeptical of the business value of it all.