Online docs, if they want to make inroads into Enterprise contexts, need to learn to play nice with the rest of the infrastructure used by companies of that size. Right now they don’t – which is fine if you’re a small company of 20 guys who are all early-adopters, but not if you’re a company of 5000 employees with well-established and standardized procedures, and a large variance of interest in new technology.

@Rurik – right on, brother. TC’s model of how an office works seems to be 37Signals, which is nice in theory, but not how any large well-established company works.

@Rurik. Crappy? Clear you mean. It does exactly what it should do.
And IT should listen to what their users want instead of deciding for them.

First, Zoho/Google Docs etc are all crappy in comparison with Office 2007. They have so much catch-up to do that it will be 5 years at least before any dent is felt.

Second, apart from a poor user experience, the IT department will not accept these solutions for several reasons: directory integration; security; data ownership and privacy; app integration; plus a few others.

TechCrunch has lots of interesting thoughts but they are too detached from the mechanics of how IT is actually deployed and used — so they end up sounding naive.

Friendly people with a decent work ethic, but horrible change ethic.

You would be surprised how many people call the browser/internet “the blue e” (it’s what is on their desktop) and how many users are still puzzled by the concept of folders (on their local drive).

Office documents as email attachements or on a network share are the spinal core of many corporate communication pipelines. And that won’t change anytime soon. Not because of technology – just because it takes years to change the behaviour of millions of users having something else to do.