Offices? Are you kidding me?
rzwitserloot posted in startup on December 5th, 2006
Spent 2 hours yesterday team-editing a document using google docs with Jeroen, whilst voicechatting by way of skype.
I have no idea why anyone would need an office given these two fantastic tools. Whilst the ‘word’ variant of google docs is a bit sparse on the formatting, editing the text there and taking care of the layout later is all sorts of shiny. Collaboration. Simple. Free.
December 5th, 2006 at 23:27
A fortiori: We had some server problems at the company I work for this week after the power outage. Which made me wonder why we host all those systems in house anyway and have our own IT department.
Most stuff we do can be easily replaced:
-E-mail -> GMail
-Mediawiki -> Jotspot
-Huge iron phone central thing -> Skype or ISP Asterisk deal
-Files -> WebDAV hosting or S3
-Scheduling -> Google Calendar or hosted Zimbra
The IT department is so wrapped up in maintaining a decrepit status quo that any real improvements are unthinkable.
My solution for a company: No IT. Give each employee a Macbook and have them figure out stuff themselves.
December 5th, 2006 at 23:32
Odds are stuff like this will creep into Enterprises anyway just as long as you can push it through the port 80 corporate firewall. See this piece by Jon Udell: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/05.html#a1572