The Tsunami of Google Wave

Image via CrunchBase

Well, Google certainly made a big splash with Wave at its I/O Conference. (Backstory: Google sent me an invitation. However, since Google Apps Premier Edition has been such a wet squib, I decided not to go. Oh, well, live and learn.)

The media has gone into over-hype drive, asking the wrong questions such as, "Is this the end of e-mail?" and "Is this the downfall of SharePoint?" (Uh, the short answer is "No" and "No.") These are the wrong questions because they look at this announcement through a technical lens: will this technology replace that technology? The better question to ask is, "How will this affect business viewpoints and processes?" And from that vantage point, Google Wave is a significant announcement.

It's significant because Google Wave makes physical a groundswell towards contextual collaboration that has been building for some time. There are a bunch of communications technologies (e.g., e-mail, IM), collaboration technologies (e.g., social networking, workspaces), and content technologies (e.g., productivity suites, document sharing) that the market has always perceived as separate. Google Wave takes them, munges them together, and allow workers to perform both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration within a work context. Rather than making the worker open an e-mail application and a word processing application and an IM application, the worker just works. The three Cs come to him, rather than him going to them. The impact of Wave is that it's an instantiation of a vision that many people--including Burton Group--have been talking about for a long time.

In the real world, what that means is enterprises will start to say to vendors, "I want a Wave-like product." Google has given them a new product category to ask for. So give Google an A+ for vision and market impact. However, they'll probably earn a much lower grade for delivering on the promise for large enterprises. There's a bunch of dynamics at work here.

First, it's not clear that Wave is geared towards enterprises. It was developed in the Google Maps group--a consumer-oriented section of Google--so it may be missing the security and policy underpinnings expected by enterprises.

Second, even if the Google Enterprise Division does end up owning Wave or having a say in its architecture, that's not a guarantee of success. Google's Enterprise Division so far has an abysmal record at delivering what enterprises need in Google Apps. Two plus years after the product has rolled out, and Google still hasn't figured out how to do role-based administration or offer some form of records management for its documents.

Third, the openness of Wave promises to be a license for chaos. As my colleague Mike Gotta pointed out in a conversation, there doesn't seem to be a well-documented metamodel available for people to refer to. So different people will look at the source code, come to different conclusions, write conflicting modules, and Wave will not necessarily hang together as a coherent, unified system. OpenSocial hasn't been a roaring success; Wave may follow in its wake.

In terms of a solution for large enterprises, in, say, a year from now, I expect Google Wave to earn a solid D. For consumers and SMBs, I wouldn't be surprised if it's in B+ territory.

However, that's in the future. For the moment, we can at least bask in the beauty of Google's vision.

Comments

[New York Yankees Jersey]

I like. I do not rule out the update history I have with it is one of these blog. I hope no one is concerned about plagiarism, but I think it is beautiful and the spread of values.