News travels slow round these parts. I have only just found out that there was an Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year. Apparently it was active, enthusiastic and judged a success by the fifty or so people who were there. Its a that shame I wasn’t one of them.

Perhaps I will be there this year, because I already know that Office 2.0 will be held again this year in San Francisco. The plan is to hold it on September 5-6 at either the St. Regis or the Four Seasons.

What exactly is the idea behind Office 2.0, you might ask? The conference site describes it thus:

Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think.

There is also a related Office 2.0 database listing over 400 online applications, most of which are free or have usable free versions. If the actual listings seem like hard work to decode I recommend you to look at the Set-up page.

This lists all the applications that the organiser, Ismael Ghalimi, uses. It also gives a set of plausible alternatives for each of them. Needless to say, all of these are links that take you straight to the relevant product site.

On a personal note, I have now uninstalled Open Office to see how long I can manage without it? I am basing this around my use of the Zoho suite of online applications. So far both Writer and Sheet have proved able to handle what I have needed. I am storing my back-up files at Omnidrive…