Google Wave To Bring Web 2.0 Lifestyle to Work

In the spirit of collaboration (like Google Wave), I’ve obtained insight from Forrester analyst colleagues Ray Wang and Rob Koplowitz. Update: I just chatted with colleague Ted Schadler who also posted his thoughts: Google Wave: Surfing The Future Of Collaboration.

Google launches a Collaboration Platform
Google announced the Wave product, a next generation collaboration platform yesterday at their developer conference, in hopes of getting third parties to build modules on it, the product won’t be released till later this year.

I just spend over an hour watching the Google Wave video, don’t bother watching it,  as I’ll summarize. Essentially, Google wows a room full of developers (aka clapping technoheads) at their conference and win them over for 30 minutes of collaboration technologies. I’m not impressed by the collaboration features themselves, I’ve seen pieces from other collaboration vendors and community platform vendors that have elements of this, or similar features that can accomplish the meet the needs of the same use case.

What it Means: Technologies are boring, what they do is what matters:

• After discussing with Forrester’s enterprise software analyst Ray Wang,  we both agree the Google Wave is about bringing together the Web 2.0 lifestyle to become a workstyle.
• Google’s apporach is  signicant because it will enter the workforce without having to go through IT management. This undercuts players like Microsoft, IBM,  Oracle, and SAP as it grows from the groundup –another groundswell like google docs and yammer.
• After speaking with  Rob Koplowitz, Forrester analyst who focuses on enterprise 2.0 he suggests this also impacts Cisco, Webex and Webex connect who is also trying to try new delivery models to the enterprise.   Expect the Webex developers to take repurpose success on Google Wave platform.
• Existing smaller collaboration vendors and community platform vendors with enterprise focus to be part of the developer ecosystem, they can now extend their features to the Wave platform.
• Google is pushing real time collaboration, and traditional email is asynchronous, yet don’t expect everyone to be interacting in real time, all the time.
• What matters is that the developer ecosystem developing on the platform, (Thank you Steve) where third party developers will do the innovation.
• This is a missed opportunity for LinkedIn who launched their platform but has not exploited as they’ve only hand selected a few partners.

These are just my initial reactions, I’ll update this post as I learn more.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 6:40 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.