What does web 2.0 mean to enterprise(2)?
June 9, 2006 – 7:53 am by coachwei | Category web 2.0 |Anil Sharma wrote a fairly good comment about some aspects of web 2.0, in particular, related to collaboration. I think this is a key area that web 2.0 can help make a big difference in a business context.
Google launched spreadsheet (http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html) - do you honestly think google plan go compete against Microsoft Excel like the reporters have been writing about? I don't think so. There are important functionality of Excel that will not be replaced by an Ajax based spreadsheet any time soon. The functionality of any Ajax-based spreadsheet or word processor (speaking of which, I wrote one of this, open sourced at http://www.ajaxword.com) will never be able to match MS Office or even WordPerfect ten years ago (by “never”, I mean at least the next few years). The point of Google Spreadsheet is not about unseating Excel, but rather about collaboration - it is about providing a new mean for people to collaborate over the web. It is a more intuitive way to share numbers. This “new way” was simply not possible before web 2.0(actually, this “new way” has been done since 1999. I remember halfbrain.com, one of the first web spreadsheets. Halfbrain.com was actually more sohpisticated than Google Spreadsheet today. Halfbrain was bought by Alphabox which was bought by IBM eventually. Part of Halbrain team started OddPost which was acquired by Yahoo and became Yahoo Email Beta now).
Web 2.0 is not simply about taking what we did before and re-do it using Ajax technology, but should be about using web 2.0 techniques for doing “new” things and helping achieving “new” efficiencies that was not easy or possible before.
What other areas that web 2.0 can make a big difference?
