Google Wave – How Things Went Wrong!

I have been fairly silent on this site for quite a while, every since I came back from Google I/O 10 actually. To say I was disappointed with the announcements surrounding Google Wave at the I/O would be a profound understatement. I didn't want to come back right away and start hammering on Google for how, I feel, they have dropped the ball on what could be such a valuable business tool. Instead, I wanted to take some time and think about the whole problem.

To be fair, the developer team should not be the ones that are the whipping boy here. But, like the actors and actresses that fight for paparazzi time in the beginning.you can't complain when that comes back full circle. This is, of course, in my mind the first problem that I have with Google Wavewhy are the developers out in front of this! Google should have a clear business plan for Google Wave and have Management and Public Relations folks out explaining how they envision Google Wave being adopted.

But, let me take a step back. Google Wave was, to me, a great leap in bringing Web 2.0 to the business community. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it is the biggest advance for business computing since Virtualization. Moreover, Virtualization is a great example of a business model Google Wave should be trying to follow. I have been harping for a long time here about how Google Wave is best suited for small to medium workgroups that have to collaborate on a specific work-flowsee my post on Gravity as an example of what I mean. However, the argument that I hear most often to counter that thought is that the business community is usually the last to adopt new technology. Ok., how then do you explain Virtualization. It was adopted by business early and almost universally. Now, of course, businesses are really pushing the limits of what they can do with Virtualization, including the military (which is always the last to adopt new IT tech).see Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) as an example of what I mean. My point being, that when a product is identified as being a business multiplier and marketed properly to the business community they are indeed first adopters.

Unfortunately for Google Wave, the Google Development Team does not seem to embrace a business vision for Google Wave. They continue to think of it as a social tool for the cloud. I strongly, strongly disagree that it has any real value in that realm. I would be focusing all my efforts on building an appliance that businesses can purchase and connect to their private servers. You build specific extensions that support their specific workflows and mass market the savings that will be realized by business when they adopt. You only have to take a quick visit to any of the Virtualization companies websites to see the myriad of offerings they have to support businesses that want to adopt virtualization.everything from product, certification, consultants, etc. This is the model that will make Google Wave successful. But it is not a model that seems to be of any interest to Google.

Why is that you may ask. Well, I think, that Google's real business model is all about the ads. Everything else that they do is only about how to support the ad end of the business. Thus, they want you to be in the cloud all the time, they want to you to be going to webpage after webpage and viewing more and more ads. They have no interest in building or marketing something that takes you farther away from their ads. So, I doubt very much that we will see a Google Wave appliance any time soon. So, rather than aggressively market Google Wave to business and talking about how a Wave appliance would benefit business they flounder around trying to make a case for real-time comments/blogging, etc. They need to get serious and think of this technology as a serious business multiplier. Make the case that any business that does not have Wave is just losing money and not being efficient.

There is a real business model here for somebody to build a Wave appliance and market it. I think that Microsoft will probably pick up on this in their next round of development for Office 2012 and beyond. Microsoft understands the enterprise community and is never one to let somebody else's good idea go to waste.

I am confident that we will eventually see real-time collaboration at the office with business using their own private servers. Unfortunately for Google, it does seem that they will not be the company that brings that to market. Again, in my mind, it is the only real logical mass use case for Google Wave. Everything else is just fluff and not very serious or useful.

Time will tell if I am right or wrong. In the mean time, I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject, so please leave a comment below.

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