Office 2.0: Zoho Business and Google Apps FAIL to Dazzle
YAY! Google gets another high profile pusher of its ”Search, Ads & Apps”: CapGemini.
Meanwhile at the Office 2.0 Conference last week, Google Apps FAILED to dazzle. Ditto for Zoho (purportedly now for) Business.
While Office 2.0 Conference attendees self-reported two days of Web Office shock and awe, the reported wi-fi connection problems at the host hotel in San Francisco says more about the current prospects of Enterprise 2.0 than the evangelism/marketing/PR of the scores of panelists and vendors hyping and demoing the dawn of a golden Web productivity day.
If you can’t connect to the Internet, you can’t collaborate via the Web! If high-flying, high-paying enterprise execs from “Global 2000 companies” are Internet challenged at the upscale St. Regis, what are the typical non first-class travelling office road warriors to do when they want to connect to Google Apps or Zoho for the vaunted Office 2.0 anytime, anywhere collaboration?
Despite the urge to believe (and party), Office 2.0 was a disappointing snooze, as I analyze in Zoho Business? Google Apps Still Safe: Zoho NOT Enterprise Ready.
NO Google Wiki! No Zoho Enterprise! Despite the pre-hype. Where was the Office 2.0 shock & awe? Left at the office.
Avenue A Razorfish “The Workplace”:
WE’RE ALL READING EACH OTHER’S BLOGS. This has resulted in all of us having more similar opinions than we may realize. Which means that conferences are becoming less about the exchange of ideas and more about networking and product demos. Not a bad thing, but nevertheless different to the conferences of the past. Along those lines, conferences have become sites for the promotion of products and consultancy services. Ideas we save for private strategy sessions only. There are exceptions but it feels like this more and more.
AND, while the Office 2.0 Conference is a wrap, the Web Office promo machine continues in the blogosphere.
ALSO SEE: Can CapGemini Really Make Google Apps Matter in the Enterprise?