I have written about the key underlying assumption behind Print 2.0: content is created, shared and distributed on the web. Print 1.0 was about riding the wave of the desktop applications. Print 2.0 is about riding the wave of the Web. Sometimes, when I say this, there is some controversy in the audience. While most would agree Web applications are a reality for each of us as consumers, the controversy tends to be centered on professional or business use.

SAP announced a few days ago their new suite of On Demand Services. While it is hardly unexpected, I find it significant, perhaps as significant as the launch of Live by Microsoft. These are the giants of the software industry. You know a shift happens when it is embraced by the giants. Henning Kagermann, SAP’s CEO described it as “the most important announcement I have made in my career here [at SAP]”. May be Henning thinks the same way I do. Granted, both SAP and Microsoft have so far targeted the mid- market (smaller enterprises and small business) rather than the larger enterprises. But you would expect this, for practical reasons (volume and speed of adoption). It’s also the way technology is developed and adopted currently: first consumers and small business, followed by mid-size enterprises and larger enterprises.

I found these two videos on Google video. They are sales pitches, I guess, but they bring an interesting perspective on the new way of thinking. Too often we tend to look at technology shifts in the context of the old model. A rich and complete feature set was key to desktop applications: they had to handle an extremely wide range of use. Yes, the equivalent web application isn’t nearly as rich. But does it matter? Instead, it is important to think in terms of the new use models or the new priorities. Marc Benioff makes the point in his video: for his enterprise, how fast you can deploy business applications to new employees matters enormously. Having an employee base all on the same release of software, all the time (because it is delivered on line) matters. We work in large, widely distributed teams these days, real time collaboration built into the tools matters.

In our Print 2.0 context, we see the same thing. I was asked recently whether our photo book editing web application that we used for the Gwen Stefani book was competing with some of Adobe’s well known applications. Maybe, if you think of Gwen as a photo editor application, but in reality not, it has a different priority: a targeted instantiation that is well tuned for the group of users that might be interested by Gwen. It does not come close to the power of an Adobe application but for the 14 year-old girl putting her concert picture into the Gwen book, it just works perfect.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Speaks about Google Apps

Eric Schmidt and Douglas Merrill talk about Google Apps

I wouldn’t be complete without the contrarian view, so here it is, Don Reisinger news blog on CNET : Will free office suites supplant Microsoft as the industry leader? . Don says: may be not after all.

Enjoy!