Web 2.0 gurus don’t practice what they preach

So it’s been exhibition week here in the UK with InfoSecurity World and Internet World both helping to fill the coffers of the Earls Court management team. Continuing my recent thoughts on the rise of virtualised desktop application development, I immediately questioned whether the suits and boots brigade in attendance would be tapping into web 2.0 technologies and take their ‘hosted’ office on the road.

Thanks to an ‘on-the-ground’ poll I was sent (shouldn’t that have been an ‘in-the-cloud’ poll? sorry!) by online scheduling tool firm Doodle it appears that the Internet-adoring execs in attendance didn’t quite practice what they were preaching.

Doodle found that almost three quarters (73 per cent) of execs surveyed at the show said their corporate culture dictated that they use traditional calendar systems, such as Microsoft Outlook, for scheduling all of their meetings and dealing with email despite this process taking as much as two to four hours of their working week.

Most relatively web 2.0 savvy execs are still apparently too busy to discover new web 2.0 methods of working. In the survey of web execs, the majority (59 per cent) said they stick with email, a fifth (20 per cent) said they use phone calls to schedule meetings and many cited other tools such as LotusNotes, Salesforce.com, iPhone, and Cappture, Facebook and Meetup. Doodle also points to its larger study of 2,500 professionals in generic industries taken across five countries.

Now don’t get me wrong; surveys like this may not be worth more than a cursory glance and, hey guess what – it was carried out by an online scheduling tool firm with appropriately loaded questions. But an interesting point for developers of virtual desktop apps must be thrown up here surely?

As these “platforms” are being rolled out in various new guises every week now, are we too focused on the delivery mechanism and not focused enough on the applications themselves? Perhaps it’s the other way around though, perhaps the apps are just easy “me too” iterations of established tools like Word and Outlook that we are all familiar with and the platform deliver mechanisms aren’t working well enough yet for us to embrace these systems.

Maybe it’s a combination of the two even?

Either way, the penny is yet to drop right? If you’re interested in this sector of the application development zone, what will be the deciding factor for you? I personally think we have some security hurdles to overcome and then there’s the question of a complete shift in mindset in terms of our usage patterns.

It’s not going to happen overnight is it?