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Google Wave - Take 2
OK - this is my second blog on Google Wave but that's because my first take was based on screenshots and the product announcement. Now I've seen the YouTube video of the presentation and read Tim O'Reilly's perspective. Frankly, while I thought Google's Wave was a big deal before I think it's much bigger now. I've been spending a little time recently looking at Sametime in relation to the new Telephony/UC2 capabilities and it's all looked kinda cool. Now it's really looking very, very humdrum and "old-hat". I guess I'm just a sucker for the latest shiny-cool thingamajig that comes my way :) However, I do need to make some corrections/clarifications from the previous Blog entry.
First up - because this Blog is meant to be Lotus-oriented - I thought initially that it might be possible to cobble something similar together out of existing Lotus functionality. That still might be the case but it's a much bigger ask. What I failed to grasp initially is that the Wave itself is the central entity of this product - it's both process and product. That means that into the mix of IBM product stack stuff we probably need to also throw Activities - a Wave can become a holding-pen for all of the collaboration (of any type) that goes around a particular idea/process/project/activity.
But, even with every single thing that IBM Lotus could throw at this I still don't think it's going to be able to duplicate the Wave. The reason for this is that the Wave has been imagined from scratch. Anything that IBM Lotus put together is going to have the residue of their existing paradigms - and in the case of most of these products that residue runs deep (just look at some of the stuff that's still in Notes to support older implementations - and don't get me started on Websphere Application Server).
Beyond all of that, there is the question of Google Wave's extremely cool set of Web-widgets (plus the various tie-ins to Google gadgets). Some of the most-impressive were:
- Drag-and-drop of images from the desktop straight into the Wave in the browser.
- Collaborative document editing with six or more people editing the same document real-time - and each one's edits showing up on all of the others' screens. Gah!
- Real-time "live" search results across Waves so that you if you tweaked the spelling on one person's Wave entry it would instantaneously appear in another person's Search Results and then (if you tweaked the spelling back again) it would instantaneously disappear.
- Contextual spell-checking - the spell-checker "learned" spelling by looking at web-pages so it understood that while been and bean were both correct spellings they were only correct in certain contexts.
- Instant-blogging from a Wave.
- Real-time language translation.
- Tight integration with Google gadgets.
- I could go on (and on, and on) ...
All of this webby goodness brings me to the real clincher for why this couldn't be Notes / Domino / Sametime / Quickr / Activities (with Websphere/Connections/DB2 et al. sitting in the background too). Google are able to do all of this because the (in)famous Cloud - and the promise of HTML 5 - was in their minds from the get-go. Notes / Domino (and the rest) just aren't built that way.
The other change to my thinking is the recognition that this goes well beyond Groove as well. All of the above problems with a Lotus equivalent to Wave equally apply to Groove. Possibly the original, pre-Microsoft Groove is closer to the Wave than a Sametime solution. But I suspect that MS have just spent a bunch of time-and-effort tying Groove closer to the rest of the Office suite (including Sharepoint) and all those tie-ins are going to make it even harder for Microsoft to build any kind of Wave-competitor out of Groove. As this commentator at CNet observed the incumbents are suffering the notorious "Innovator's Dilemma" and are now going to struggle.
Now, I'm totally open to the likelihood that I've just been bowled over by a clever demo and a lot of web hyperbole. I can certainly see the barriers to acceptance of this new paradigm in the enterprise. While the technology and the capabilities of Google Wave are totally cool the reality is that the Wave is a brand new paradigm and whether a new paradigm gets accepted or not is not going to be up to the technology (although that has to be good). Instead, the new paradigm has to be a good fit to how people want to do stuff. It's entirely possible that Google Wave will fall by the wayside and be the next Orkut. My gut feel, though, is that this isn't the case - this one could be here to stay and if that's true then those of us working in the enterprise collaboration space need to think about how we're going to respond - close our eyes and look the other way, work our asses off to build a response out of other technologies or embrace the new paradigm and see how we can work with it.
UPDATE: Nathan Freeman from Lotus911 has a very similar take on things. Nathan is a strong advocate for Notes / Domino (although not slow to criticize either) ... and he sees this as a game-changer that totally outflanks IBM / MS in the collaboration space.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheLotusEater/~3/TbTmM2QMZIM/google-wave-take-2.html
Jun 01, 2009
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