The Office 2.0 conference attracted a monotonous crowd of entrepreneurs, big software vendors, VCs, and IT analysts focused on introducing web-enabled office apps into The Enterprise (a.k.a. organizations with fat wallets). Considering the consumer space is so peculiarly nonprofitable for anyone but Google, who can blame these technophiles for looking to Enteprise 2.0 in its most generic and nonsituated form for their big payoff?
And yet, the way to succeed with a new Office 2.0 service may not be to market it to your own kind. David Terrar suggests that ignoring the world outside Web 2.0 may be a mistake:
The majority of the discussions were about the features, functions and characteristics of the tools on offer, as well as the barriers to adoption by the various communities in the enterprise. It was mostly vendors and analysts talking to vendors and analysts and VCs about the software business, rather than talking about the business of what the software does. There was very little about real customer case studies and examples, and hardly any mention of vertical application areas where these tools can be put to use. In pure marketing terms, that’s what many of the vendors should be doing. Even if they are adopting a self service, consumer style approach to distributing and supporting their product, they should not be following suit with their marketing. They should be following the successful path of so many software authors, encapsulated in Geoffrey Moore’s Inside the Tornado, or Dealing with Darwin, and targeting niche, vertical markets, getting strong in them and then moving on to the next vertical (with World domination as the eventual goal, but in small steps!). This was voiced by Eric Hoffert, the CEO of ShareMethods who asked the panel “What are the 5 vertical apps we should be targeting” and went on to use Apple as an example with their early focus on the design and desktop publishing market. [emphasis added]
Here’s where the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam offered something you couldn’t find at the conference itself. We heard about a nonprofit’s Salesforce.com implementation, Web 2.0 in higher education, the importance of full and sophisticated feature sets in office software, and even technology usage in Afghanistan. Were I to make one change to the podcast jam, it would be to inject more of this real world flavor into the discussions.
What the Web 2.0 world suffers from is déformation professionelle, skewed and biased thinking that our technocentered experience of the working world exhausts the possibilities in it and for it. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on techmeme.
