The monolithic office suite -- typified by Microsoft Office -- represents the evolutionary peak of a certain value proposition, rooted in the sensibilities of the 90s. Adoption of proprietary, de facto standards for document format (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) and various conventions around coordination and communication (like Outlook and Exchange) led to a monopoly for Microsoft, and the extinction of any serious alternatives. Even on the Macintosh platform, Microsoft apps enjoyed a comfortable dominance.

But the advent of web based applications, like Gmail, blogs, and the explosion of new social apps -- Flickr, MySpace, and the ten zilllion others now coming on line -- suggest a new paradigm is here, and that people will be spending less time working "in" the desktop office and much, much more time using a broad collection of web apps.

Unlike the desktop office suite, this new web office will be a loosely connected and constantly growing collection of social tools:

• Spaces, not Documents -- We are moving past the document metaphor: a computer file, saved locally on a PC or LAN, usually being accessed and edited by one person at a time, and routed around as an email attachment. While various collaboration models emerged prior to today's web app renaissance -- like Lotus Notes and Groove -- none of these actually displaced the now familiar notion of editing a document and circulating it for review in email.

  Today, however, the ubiquity and speed of web connections have made it possible for us to move onto the web, and into realtime shared space with our collaborators, and leave behind the era of communicating islands connected by slow, asynchronous email connections.



• Publish/Subscribe, not Edit/Route -- As we leave behind the email and doc metaphor, we are adopting a publish/subscribe mentality. I create a post at Basecamp or on a Wiki to communicate with my partners, and they are pinged by an RSS reader.


• Aggregation, not Embedding -- Instead of collating a bunch of relevant information into a document, I collect various sources of information into a shared location -- a calendar of events from one service, recent blog posts from another, and a web-based spreadsheet from a third -- aggregated into a fourth service, designed for the purpose of rendering (like NetVibes). This is going to build on the glue that makes these web apps connect: RSS, javascript, and various XML standards that will emerge to support microformats (so that one tool can emit an RSS entry marked as a calendar event, for example, and it can be received by another app that can use it appropriately).
  
• Persistent Participation, not Review/Edit Cycles -- Individuals, in this federated model of collaboration, are more likely to be participants in an on-going process, not just reviewing documents in a workflow.
  

In effect, this migration of people onto the web and off their desktops is the end of the information age model of files and point-to-point communication. We are moving into a social age, where there are no 'files' -- except when they are created to hand off to those who still have not made the move to the social web, those who still want 'files' to store on their hard drive. Don't misunderstand me: obviously, their are still computer files being managed somewhere by these web apps: but people will not be directly accessing them, or conceiving of 'editing a file' and 'attaching the file to an email' and so on. Instead, we will be focused on the social context -- a shared space with a collection of individuals working on a project, for example -- not a collection of documents being manipulated by team members and routed around.

Again, this is similar to the ideals that motivated the groupware movement in the mid 90s, but today's web environment, and the advent of the unifying elements of web app architecture, have eliminated the barriers to adoption that dogged groupware solutions: everyone can be invited, there is no steep cost or technological threshold to bring individuals into a shared space, and widespread adoption of standards -- RSS, XML, etc. -- break up the monopolistic, fragmented market that we had in the 90s (Lotus Notes v Microsoft Exchange v eRoom v Novell v ...).

The confluence of these changes will be reflected in new patterns of interaction and collaboration in the workplace:

• Augmented meetings -- where participants remain connected to the web, even when meeting face to face -- will become the norm, since individuals will come to rely on web tools as their primary medium for interaction. Everything needed for the meeting -- the agenda, not taking, supporting information, presentations -- will reside in shared space on the web, so meeting participants will stay in the shared web space even while sitting in a shared physical space.
  
• Federated work -- Organizations are shaped by the communication models in place. Top-down communication of the industrial era led to hierarchical forms, with clear lines of authority and responsibility. Information age communication was dominated by lateral flows, from person to person, and this led to a trimming of many layers of the industrial hierarchy, and a distribution of authority and responsibility into a tree-structured network: a modification of the hierarchy, but one in which authority is associated with controlling the workflows: sign-off, approval, and go/no go decisions at key points in workflows. In this social web era, communication takes place in shared space, and authority is derived from reputation and social trust. Organizations will become more fluid, and individuals will increasingly affiliate with those that they want to work with, rather than being 'assigned' to specific departments (industrial era) or project teams (information era).
  

Email was the killer meme of the industrial era, and the emerging, composite infrastructure that will support a federation of web apps to be the new office (in several meanings of the term "office") will be the killer meme of the post-everything era we are now trailblazing.