Watching the Google Wave demo and reading Tim O’Reilly’s enthusiastic review, it struck me how amazingly cool Wave promises to be…and just how paltry most enterprise software remains. Sure, you think: it’s easy for Google to innovate. It has thousands of engineers! Maybe. But I don’t remember Microsoft coming up with Wave, and it has even more engineers. Neither did IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc. Google did, and it started Wave with a small core team of two brothers, a core team that appears to have done much of the work gestating Wave to its currently demo-able state. There’s a very good reason that Google innovated Wave, and not, for example, IBM.
Archive for June, 2009
Google Wave: Why it’s so good and enterprise software is so bad
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009How Google is boosting its innovation efforts
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Internet giant Google is improving its innovation process to ensure its top management hear about the best ideas much faster than before.
The company, which famously allows its employs to spend one workday per week exploring projects unrelated to their job profiles, has set up a structure by which its engineers will now report ideas through division management channels, while chief executive Eric Schmidt will hear the best ideas at internal ‘innovation reviews’.
The meetings “force management to focus” on ideas that could be developed further, Schmidt told The Wall Street Journal. “We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed,” he said.
It’s time to replace Twitter and Facebook
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Hats off to Michael Arrington from Techcrunch for his awesome interview with the Google Wave team.
You can find video and a transcript of this interview at Techcrunch.com but I wanted to take a minute and hit the highlights here.
My favorite moment comes toward the end of the interview when Michael asks them if they’re building “a Twitter-killer.”
He pitches it like a joke, but the question is dead serious, and the reaction is priceless.
Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra actually shakes his head and says, “Michael, Michael, Michael…”
Read the full article at lubbockonline.com
Google Wave Questions and Answers
Monday, June 15th, 2009
After whinging loudly about not having access to the Google Wave preview, Santa GOOG dropped me an invite. Last night I held a Wave Q&A on Twitter; here are the results, complete with screenshots.
I’m no Wave expert, but now that I’ve got my dirty little paws on it I had some insights to share. The question and answer transcript is here, plus those images. Note: Sadly we have no invites to share.
Read the full article at LifeHacker
Google Wave Extensions: An Inside Look
Monday, June 15th, 2009
It’s undeniable: Google Wave has captured the imagination of techies, social media enthusiasts, and web users everywhere. Its combination of email, real-time chat, wiki tools, and social networking have generated an incredible amount of buzz.
While the focus of this buzz is centered around Google Wave’s features, there’s an aspect of the new platform that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: Google Wave extensions, which allow any developer to add their own gadgets or robots to the open-source tool. Extensions offer the potential for Google Wave to end up being used in so many different ways. But what exactly is an extension? Why would someone build one? And how exactly does one go about it?
Thanks to developers Sam Gammon and Nick Hume, we now have the answers to most of these questions. We looked inside the process of building a Google Wave extension, from start to finish and assembled the following guide, which explains the concept of a Google Wave extension, why they’re important, how one can be built, and what you can expect in the coming future.
Read the full article at Mashable.com
The enterprise implications of Google Wave
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Dion Hinchcliffe: I’m betting that it’s likely to be one of the most interesting offerings to businesses that the company has created yet. With the open positioning, early outreach to the world, and the clarity of purpose and design, Google Wave has a good shot at helping take Enterprise 2.0 to the next level in many organizations.
Wave’s Potential for Enterprise Integration
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Could this innovative communications platform be a ‘Holy Grail’ for enterprise application integration? Obviously, it’s too soon to tell – Wave isn’t even available for the public yet — and the use of “Holy Grail” always reeks of hyperbole, but there are others who believe there are enterprise integration possibilities.
Read the full article on ITBusinessEdge (new window)
Microsoft Calls Google Wave “Anti-Web”
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
“Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft) says that Google Wave is ‘anti-Web,’ by which he seems to mean that it is too complex for its own good. In the video he complains about its complexity in relation to Microsoft’s Live Mesh: ‘If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals… then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it.’ That’s its weakness to Ozzie, apparently — that this complexity that can only be overcome by open source.
Read the full article at Slashdot.org (new window)
Google Wave has great potential for education
Monday, June 8th, 2009
In an ISTEConnects.org blog post, Joe Corbett, online community manager for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), discussed Google Wave and traded blog comments about the application’s potential with other educators.
“I’m happy to put myself on record as having said that all of you who are reading this will use this product in some way, whether it is to conduct classes, arrange social events, or manage your digital footprint,” Corbett wrote.
“… I think having many users collaborating on the same project/document at the same time in multiple languages across multiple platforms opens the door for some amazing cross-cultural learning,” he wrote in a reply to other comments.
“Teaching about France? Plug Google Wave into your wiki and invite French students to work with your students in real time with translations on the fly for both groups. [I'm] sure that can be done now, but not as close to real time as this is and not without a tremendous amount of preliminary communication. It will be easy to jump into collaborative learning sessions anywhere you find them … the possibilities are endless.”
Read the full article on eSchoolNews.com (new window)
Google Wave is the New E-mail, but others reinvent e-mail too
Sunday, June 7th, 2009While Google Wave is opening many new ways for developers to reinvent communication, others are doing the same using the regular e-mail protocol.
Cc:Betty
Cc:Betty creates a communication stream from e-mails Cc:Betty receives as a Carbon Copy of your e-mail. This is a very expandable concept.
Go to www.ccbetty.com to read more. (link opens in new window)
Gmail Labs
Gmail offers several innovative features, partly in Gmail Labs:
- Preview content from Flickr, Picasa and YouTube in your e-mail (Labs)
- Threaded discussions by grouping e-mail by subject and sender(s)
- Translate messages to your own language (Labs)
- Create an event with Google Calendar from an e-mail
Both initiatives leave us wondering if the classic e-mail concept could be reinvented and compete with Google Wave.