Web Office – What’s next? What’s innovative? Richard McManus has his Web Office 2007 Year in Review up today. The real trend in Office 2.0 has been on polish and refinement, and not on what you can really call innovation in a deep, Clayton Christensen sort of way. Exactly one year ago, I was playing around with Dan Bricklin’s Wikicalc, now part of Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext empire, today, I’m using Editgrid, and I frequently marvel at just how much of Excel’s functionality that it can supplant. Editgrid has the smoothest and most refined sharing and invite features that I’ve seen in a web office application outside of the Google Apps remora-like integration with Gmail, but at root, it’s still a spreadsheet just like those we have been using for 25 or so years.

So, again, my question is: what’s innovative on the web office horizon that is truly web-native from the ground up? Probably the most web-native applications out there are the various project management/internal blog/corporate wiki/IM packages that attempt to fill a nebulous and wooly space called ‘collaboration’. While more web-native than, ‘Word, only online’ – these products are really exercises in packaging and marking-up a few, well-established consumer web apps that have been around for 10 or so years. As any patent examiner worth her salt will tell you, munging up a bunch of prior art, while often useful, does not a non-obvious invention make.

Where do I think the real step-function innovation will come from as the progress cycle rolls over from a period of refinement to a period of invention? If I knew for sure, we could all go home right now, but since I don’t I can only speculate. My bet is that we will see far-reaching and paradigm changing innovation and impact from initiatives like SFdC’s ‘Salesforce to Salesforce’ and, oh okay, blist!