OK, so Mike Arrington went a bit over the top yesterday in declaring Google Wave “one of the most ambitious and exciting products the tech world has seen in a long while.”
And you have to bear in mind, as Rob Koplowitz at Forrester warns, that any time Google claims to have “reinvented” something it gets the rest of us talking, even if it’s often hard to assess the eventual impact of projects like this (at least it balanced Microsoft’s claim the same day of having reinvented search.)
Still, there was something charmingly excessive about the idea of sending a team of hot-shot developers to Australia for a couple of years to work on a secret project, then jetting them to San Francisco for an 80-minute demo in front of 4,000 eager developers (YouTube video here.) Lars Rasmussen’s rock-star status as creator of Google Maps had already guaranteed him an easy ride in front of this crowd.
In reality, like a lot of these things, Wave is both more and less than it seems.
Combining different forms of communication – both synchronous and asynchronous – in one place in a Web browser, and integrating that with blogs and wikis, is not entirely original, but Google’s rendition certainly looked impressive.
The sort of things it makes possible: inserting IM side-chats into documents or emails so that you can have a running conversation within the text itself. Using the promised APIs, developers could also take these “hosted conversations” and embed them into other Web pages.
The most compelling uses for this are in areas that involve group interaction – and the biggest need for that right now is at work.
In many ways, social networks have already evolved to handle online group behaviour for consumers. You can already have a running group discussion, or post your photos and let your friends comment on them, on your Facebook page. Wave scratches that same itch in a slightly different way.
However, the corporate equivalent of social networks – tools that let people draw on connections and relationships inside their companies, or from their wider network, to communicate and collaborate more efficiently – are taking longer to emerge. Most workers are still trapped in email hell.
Companies like Socialtext have been building out a suite of tools, while IBM and Microsoft in their own way have each been pushing at the same boundaries. Ted Schadler at Forrester reckons Microsoft now has another hill to climb, while IBM is already making some innovative moves in this area. And as my colleague Joe Menn wrote earlier this week, Cisco is hard at work dog-fooding its own technology to try to get a leg up in the collaboration business.
Google’s move into the enterprise technology market looks to be on one of those slow but inevitable trajectories. It’s always ironic to hear Microsoft try to write it off on the grounds that enterprise customers demand greater reliability from, and support for, their technology, given how Microsoft itself climbed this same credibility curve.
You can imagine Wave hitting a classic adoption cycle: early consumer users take it up, then start to use it in their working lives. By the time more cautious IT departments are ready to consider it, it already has strong support from a vocal group of workers. By then, Google’s credibility as an enterprise tech company has been established. Those of us enslaved to our Web 1.0 work tools are finally liberated.
That’s the great thing about the sort of uplifting presentation Google gave this week. We can all dream.
