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.