Jason McCabe Calacanis says that Google is going to build Office.

I think Calacanis is right about a Google office tool, but it won’t look like a traditional Open Office style set of desktop applications done on the web. In fact, Google’s Office and Microsoft Office live are not going to look like MS Office. Instead, they are both trying to build Web Office.

New technology and new approaches to working with old technology are going to change the way we work radically.

As I mentioned in my first Web Office screencast, Web Office is going to leverage these Web 2.0 technologies to create something totally new and more powerful.

These three things changes are going to power Web Office.

1 - The Read / Write Web

The Read/ Write web is Richard MacManus‘ term, and it sums up perfectly what has happened. People now believe that instead of just surfing the web, users should contribute as much content as they consume. The results are blogs and wikis. People are also sharing bookmarks (delicious), photos(flickr) and even interesting stories(digg). This is fundamentally different from simply using a web based application to sell something, find a job or find a mate. The difference is that blogs and wikis support the distribution of ideas and innovations, while sites like eBay or Monster are simply one-off innovations themselves.

Blogs and wikis can be used to solve millions of different types of problems, while B2C sites only solve one problem.

Web office solutions are going to use this new philosophical approach (that the web should be both readable and writeable) to redefine how knowledge workers share information.

With enterprise blogs and enterprise wikis, knowledge workers will now have the ability to efficiently communicate with a large audience.

2 - Web Pages that React Instantly

Up until recently, working on the web was kind of clunky. AJAX has changed all that. This is purely a usability issue, but it will have a big impact. AJAX means that web pages can now react instantly to user requests.

This is a huge advantage, and will make working on the web much more palatable for end users.

The best business example I have seen so far is at Zimbra, where their enterprise web email tool has some amazing integration with contact lists and calendar tools. Just hover over a name and you get that person’s contact information. Just hover over a date, or even a word like “tomorrow”, and Zimbra gives you your calendar information for that day.

This whiz-bang integration capability will drive business end users to demand a switch over to Web Office.

3 - Mashups (aka Extensibility & Re-usability

Housingmaps.com, which combines the classified listings on Craigslist with Google maps, is the most famous tech mashup out there.

A mashup combines information from multiple systems in a new, and often, unexpected way.

Google Maps Mania keeps track of the vast range of ways that people have applied this simple tool.

Now, imagine what will happen when the knowledge workers in a company can start creating mashups from information available in enterprise wiki’s, enterprise blogs and legacy systems.

For example, imagine an internal Facebook that combines people’s bios with links to project blogs and their calendars. Go to a project page, see who’s working on it, and when they are available for a meeting.

The elements that will make this work include the broad adoption of standards ( such as microformats ) and internal engineering efforts to create APIs to legacy systems.

The eventual result of this sea change will be move towards enterprise widgets, which will give knowledge workers the framework needed to easily build internal enterprise mashups by combining enterprise solutions like so much conceptual lego.

Web Office will be an Enterprise Widget platform, as much as it is a tool for communicating with words and pictures.

Who will win - Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft?

Web Office means that the platform that knowledge workers use to build solutions has changed. Enterprise blogs, enterprise Wikis, mashups and sharing tools mean that knowledge workers are now innovation creators, building solutions on the web instead of building them in static local tools like MSWord or Excel.

The O/S that counts has changed. It is now a web based O/S. With the announcement of Office Live, Microsoft has acknowledged this fact.

In a recent article entitled Google PC, Google Server, Don St. John points out that what Google is really good at is building servers.

So, my speculation: I would not be surprised, if this Google PC idea bears fruit, to see a similar effort aimed at servers, with a Google-tweaked server OS that’s either sold as a stand-alone app or a hosted service. The company already has its own custom clustering OS and file system; it would not take forever to scale that down to the commercial market. And for hosting, Google’s technology is totally there now.

Does this mean that Google has a head-start in the race to dominate the O/S and is Web 2.0?

What about the role of enterprise search in this new space?

What about Yahoo!

Yahoo!’s approach is a little different, but equally impressive. Check out Yahoo! Small Business. Most of the tools a small company needs. They have even recently added blogs by TypePad.

The problem that Google and Yahoo! have is basic. Neither has the sales force and the support teams to support big business. To overcome this, Google and Yahoo! will either have to build huge enterprise software sales teams, or convince big business to give up the notion of in-house servers and start using software as a service.

Right now, I am not sure which way it will play out.

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