It is an understatement to say how rapidly things have changed in the global economy in the past 60 days. In the last post on the blog, we discussed the impact of AIG and Lehman on the enterprise buyers. Now, those seem like the good old days, with even Google now having lost confidence in its ability to execute in the short term.
But the global recession will actually truly and finally focus the role of Office 2.0 technologies. An early thesis was that the value proposition around Office 2.0 was a combination of (1) free and/or dirt cheap and (2) collaboration. Free actually is harder to give away in a down market. The reason being that any product, even free, requires an investment to understand a new business process, and a new product. When businesses of all size are struggling to make their plans, there isn't much incentive to experiment, and free isn't enough to make up for any perceived distraction from protecting the core business.
Collaboration per se, while core to the Office 2.0 thesis, loses a huge portion of its perceived value in a downturn. Much of the boom in SaaS, Office 2.0 and webservices in 2007 and 1h '08 was around improving efficiencies in scaling organizations. When organizations instead shrink, communication is probably actually even more important -- but investment in communication whose ROI is tied to faciliatating growth is essentially dead.
So where does that leave Office 2.0? In an extremely interesting place that was almost unthinkable in 2006 (where many saw it almost as a joke or a hobby for webheads). Office 2.0 in Q4 '08 and 2009 is and will be about (x) increasing and (y) protecting revenue. That is the only place money, and effort, will be spent. We're seeing this firsthand at EchoSign, where paid customers are accelerating -- not to bring order to their business processes (the 2007/1H '08 theme), but rather, to protect revenue, to close that ever-rarer beast, the ready-to-buy customer, with an electronic signature before they change their mind. I would expect our friends at Freshbooks for example are seeing a similar trend.
Forget about cost savings from Office 2.0. Instead, the Office 2.0 that leaders have revenue-centric ROI that can be measured instantly, or in days, will thrive.
Well, We are all should used to innovation...
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