Mea Culpa 2.0
I was talking to Jeff Clavier last night. He was just dropping in to say hi to his friend Ismael Ghalimi, the brains behind the Office 2.0 conference. What struck me was Jeff's story of how Ismael went from a standing start to a full-blown conference in a year. The event thus represents his deep dive into the area loosely defined as Office 2.0, a kind of roll up of a hunch that lead to a rigorous exploration and resulted in a surprisingly efficient engine for teasing out the New Office dynamics.
As I mentioned yesterday, there has been a bit too much of the Office 2.0 dialectic — does offline matter, what about IT resistance, broadband glitches, and gorilla dodging. But ignoring that, which became easier mid-yesterday when people got bored with the meta discussion Office 2.0? and started to drill into opportunity.
Even the breakouts, a format I personally hate because of its fragmentation and siloing of "tracks", bore fruit. Most personal and yet compelling on an enterprise level was a frank admission by IBM's Bob Sutor, a tenacious operative in the IBM/Microsoft/Sun WS-I wars, that IBM's heavy handed standards play ran into a buzzsaw from Tim Berners Lee around ownership of contributed technology. The net: "we lost." The meta message: we deserved to.
It was a casual message, delivered not with pride or regret, but simple grace, from a tough customer who has deeply matured. I went up to him and buried a 5 year hatchet, grateful that I was in the room when an answer to an attendee question coaxed out this remarkable transformation. David Berlind encouraged me months ago to ease up and open a dialogue, but it was this serendipity that closed the loop and gave me the understanding that Berlind, and not me, was right.
Another format I despise, the 5 minute demo cattle call, led ably but reduntantly by Mike Arrington, also exceeded expectations. Perhaps it was Arrington's Darwinian m.o. or his quick switch from only his followup questions to audience participation that improved the dialogue, but the speed tended to cull the common features and accentuate the range and vertical properties of the various startups. Major vendors were neither cited nor fretted about. Some of the tools were used to create the conference site, organize an adhoc group of bloggers who pulled the conference enterprise focus together, even aggregate and share accounting metadata contributed by small businesses in order to see how they stack up.
Oddly, many of these tools promise deep integration with blog posting but don't actually make it a click away. Wordpress developers should take note: the enterprise mindset of these startups leaves blog (meida) integration on the table, an artifact perhaps of the naive view expressed by one panelist that blogs are one-dimensional or that the other basic trend of Wikis-are-for-business is the end of the story. And the lack of focus on supporting not just Office 1.0 formats but Google Office will prove fatal for many of these clever plays. Having domain expertise will only last as a barrier to entry until Google rationalizes its API subsystem. 6 months maximum.
It feels good to underestimate somebody or some group or an event with the millstone of Office 2.0 branding. But Ismael's centered confidence in what he has discovered both in terms of focus and community has birthed a formidable model that sits comfortably along the conference/unconference fault line with few of the defects of either extreme. Thanks to Dan Farber for intuiting this and pushing me to show up.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
I was the guy sat next to you on the ealry morning sections with crap wifi while you giggled like Cheshire cat. I’d flown 6K miles to attend and like you, I felt it elevated an important conversation.