That was the verdict of Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s top software guru, when I got to ask him last night what he thought about Google’s hugely ambitious attempt to remake email, IM and, um, just about everything else.
He was speaking at the Churchill Club in San Francisco about his efforts to prepare Microsoft for the architectural shift to cloud computing (commenting on the PC-centric view of the world that dominated thinking at the company when he arrived, he confessed: “It was a bit scary”).
But it is his deep thinking and original work around collaboration that has defined most of Ozzie’s career, from Lotus through Groove Networks. So isn’t Wave the culmination of what he himself had been working towards – a collaboration tool with the power to transform the way groups of people work together?
Certainly, Ozzie was highly complimentary about Google’s vision and ambition. Much will be learned from Wave about how people want to communicate and collaborate online, he said.
He essentially predicted failure, however, because Wave does not play to the strengths of the Web. Rather, it is an attempt to foist a fully-formed, complex system onto the online ecosystem, and the Web rejects such approaches.
As Ozzie described it, the power of the Web lies in the ability of many different developers to build their own, independent and interoperable implementations of services from toolkits of foundational technologies. It doesn’t matter if some of these implementations are very basic and lack the full capabilities of others: what matters is that they can be created easily and interoperate.
Certainly, Google has said it will open-source much of the software around Wave, including its own implementation of the idea, to try to kick-start wider adoption.
But as conceived, said Ozzie, Wave is just too big and complex a system. Google’s engineers had no choice but to take this approach given the grandeur of their vision, but in the process they have come up with something that will fail to get adopted in the fabric of the Web.
Often, criticism from a competitor can be dismissed as simple adversarial rhetoric. But given Ozzie’s deep passion about the subject and obvious admiration for what Google is attempting, it’s hard to brush his conclusions off so easily.
