Wave Rolls Ashore
September 30, 2009
Google Wave rolls into a town of about 100,000 developers. There are dozens of stories that explain Wave. I think that most of them state the obvious. A good example is the Computer World write up “Google Wave: A New Kind of Mega-Application.”
For me, an interesting observation in the Computer World story was:
As for businesses, companies desperately need a technology like Wave to help their employees collaborate in a more streamlined way. Unfortunately, most enterprises remain years away from switching to this type of information stream, due to their current technology infrastructures.
What I noticed is that Wave is being explained in terms of existing technologies and well known services. I think such comparisons are helpful. In my opinion, however, those comparisons are incorrect and potentially misleading. Wave is not familiar nor old. Functions within Wave appear to be the familiar services. The environment in which these services exist is quite new. Google is not doing a variant of SharePoint. Google is not putting email on steroids.
Wave is one of the first, although primitive, dataspace applications. Until that concept gets traction, competitors may see Wave and its applications as something familiar given a new coat of paint or some lipstick. That is the type of thinking that created the mental wheel spinning in the telecommunications and publishing sectors when Google was dismissed as a Web search and ad vendor.
There’s a simplified description of dataspaces in Google: The Digital Gutenberg and an IDC report which Sue Feldman and I wrote on the subject in September 2008. If you are an IDC client, request report 213562 or snag a copy of my new monograph from Infonortics.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2009
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