Office 2.0: Someone's gotta pay
I'm at the Office 2.0 conference (more) listening to the organizer, Ismael Ghalimi, discuss his pure Web 2.0 philosophy for setting up the conference: No local software, no files stored on PCs, no paper at all. At this conference, Ismael is even hoping that a special iPhone-friendly Web site set up for attendees will obviate the need for business card exchange (this is so not going to happen, but it's a good experiment).
Supporting the 600 attendees, nearly all of whom are spending time heads-down in either a Wi-Fi laptop or their conference-provided iPhones, there's a serious network infrastructure. I counted 20 Swisscom-provided pole-mounted Wi-Fi repeaters in the main ballroom alone. Kind of frightening. And it reminds us that Office 2.0 isn't free or easy. Just because a PC may not be storing data or processing its own applications, the infrastructure has got to run somewhere. Remember this if you're thinking about moving your business over to Web 2.0.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
