The real impact of Web Office

Steve Rubel pointed to an white paper by Rod Boothby of Innovation Creators that discusses the near-future impact web office technologies will have on the future way we work. It's a great read and one I encourage you to investigate. What I appreciate most about the perspective Boothby comes at this subject from is his immediate and unqualified rejection of the notion that a web-based version of the current desktop tools we use today is either necessary or desirable. Or that the connective technologies we have become accustomed to are anything other than a baseline for the tools we will use in the future. Early in the paper, pointing to the next generation of knowledge workers he writes:

The average MBA graduates in 2006 are not just knowledge workers. They are capable of being highly networked internal entrepreneurs and innovation creators. Their ability to connect is not just about email, BlackBerries, text messages and voice-mails. They are intimately familiar with all those tools, but ultimately, expertise with those one-to-one connectivity tools is just the price of admission.
What makes these new graduates so effective is their ability to work efficiently with large virtual teams and their amazing ability to maximize the power of their personal networks.

and then, a few pages later:

It’s interesting to note that Web Office is not an AJAX version of Microsoft Office, but instead, is a whole new way of working. So AJAX powered versions of MS Word or Excel are not really needed. And they do not achieve any significant bump in productivity over existing tools because they are not designed to help knowledge workers efficiently communicate with a large audience. Instead, blogs and Wikis will take over that role.

Exactly right. This is a must read for anyone interested in the evolution of work we're experiencing the earliest stages of right now. Both an online and PDF version are available.