Today the Wall Street Journal had an article that asked “Is it time to dump your desktop?”

The author Rob Guth talks about ThinkFree, which has a Java very of Office. It’s certainly a very cool application, but the spreadsheet does not handle everything yet.

For example, a few years ago, I put together a spreadsheet to calculate a Cholesky Decomposition of a variance/covariance matrix. This is one of the key steps used by people trading credit derivatives and CDOs. And it’s a great example of Wall Street derivatives traders happily using something that they know does not work. Stanford’s Darrel Duffie has shown that you are much better of using correlated default intensities. All of which is probably not of interest to most of the folks who read this blog.

ThinkFree lets you publish the spreadsheet, so you can see the results for yourself here: Cholesky Decomposition Spreadsheet. Make sure you check out all three tabs. You will see that the basic decomposition works fine, but ThinkFree seems to have some trouble with matrix multiplication. To really see the calculations, you will need to go into power edit mode.

Maybe that isn’t an issue for most people.

In the same web issue, the WSJ has a pod cast with Microsoft’s Rajesh Jha, who talks about Office Live. Jha talks about how Microsoft is going after the under served small business market.

Are we there yet? Has Enterprise 2.0 Started to Arrive?

It is good news that the WSJ is starting to think about the use of Web 2.0 technology within the enterprise. However, as I have said before, simple web based versions of what we already have does not represent an amazing new development.

Open Office and Star Office have been around for years. Both offer a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. Neither have taken off. People do not have much reason to switch from MS Office. MS Office works well enough for its intended purpose, so what is the reason to switch.

The real opportunity presented by Web 2.0 technology isn’t simply to replace MS Office, but instead to embrace and radically extend office.

For ten years, knowledge workers have had Word, Excel, PowerPoint and nothing new. That’s ten years of the same tools.

Now, with Web 2.0, there is an opportunity to add to that tool kit with a whole new series of tools. The first two new tools are Blogs and Wikis. After that, embedded widgets or Mashets will help to further empower knowledge workers.

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes before the WSJ starts to cover the use of those Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise.