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Google Wave: Taking the Enterprise from Microsoft?

By Chelsi Nakano  | Published Jun 12, 2009

Two weeks ago, everybody was talking about it. It manhandled the blogosphere, was a trending topic on Twitter, and whispers of it could still be heard coming from the mouths of various Gilbane SF attendees last week.

And, OK, we admit it; Google Wave romanced us a little, too. But now that the smoke has cleared and Wave has had ample time to settle into the ‘net, the inevitable troop of naysayers has surfaced. Let’s check out what they have to say:

Google Has a Gigantic Head

Google Wave, a virtual ecosystem for communication and collaboration, better known ‘round the way as an e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging, social networking mashup, is based on Google’s idea of what e-mail would look like if it were designed today. The Developer Preview—an hour and a half long video of Wave features—received a rare standing ovation at this year’s Google I/O.

The reinvention of digital interaction? Of e-mail? Web 3.0? Standing ovations? Wave's practically dripping with ambition, and Uncle G (understandably) isn’t exactly being modest about the whole thing.

Google’s tendency to focus on the consumer before the enterprise has certainly gained them a staggering audience, but when it comes to Wave, the few that remain skeptical wonder if the enterprise is in need of something so radically different. Specifically: how much impact will Wave really have on businesses? Where’s that point of view?

Google’s Looking A Lot Like Microsoft?

The bigger you get, the less room you have to trash talk. Microsoft, like any respectable and ginormous company, is usually pretty careful about publicly criticizing its competitors, hence the reason they haven’t issued any proclamations about Wave and how it does or doesn’t compete with Outlook/Windows Live, etc. Likewise, Google hasn't positioned Wave as competition for Microsoft. 

HowEVER, a Program Manager at Microsoft named Dare Obasanjo, did note in a tweet just after Wave was announced that the new tool bears a striking resemblance to two Microsoft projects, Hailstorm and Live Mesh.

Hailstorm was scrapped, but regarding Live Mesh, Obasanjo writes on his blog, "The one interesting parallel worth calling out is that both products/visions/platforms are most powerful when there is a world of different providers each exposing their data types to one or more of these rich user applications (i.e. a Mesh client or Wave client)."

He continues on to admit Google's job well done: "Thus far I think Google has done a better job than we did with Live Mesh in being very upfront about this realization and evangelizing to developers that they participate as providers. Of course, the proof will be in the putting in a year or so when we see just how many services have what it takes to implement a truly interoperable federated provider model for Google Wave."

And then of course there's SharePoint. At a press conference following the announcement of Wave, Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering at Google, reportedly discussed Wave's openness as something lacking in SharePoint. He suggested that in time, businesses considering SharePoint but worried about vendor lock-in may have an attractive lightweight alternative.

We love competition and some slightly underhanded blows just as much as the next guy, but what's most excellent about the Microsoft vs. Google battle is what it means for the Web as a whole. Putting in perfectly is Neil Pearlstein, president of PC Professional, an Oakand based Microsoft Gold Partner who said, "I don't think Google Wave is an immediate threat to SharePoint, but the race is on, and both Google and Microsoft are going to be pushing each other to create innovative products." 

That doesn't sound like such a bad thing, now does it?

A Wave of Dreams

At the end of the day, perhaps the only solid, semi-worrisome thing we can think of when it comes to Wave is the excitement surrounding it. The ol’ adage “If you build it, they will come” is obviously being applied to the Google brand, but it may be overly optimistic this time.

The fact remains that Wave hasn’t even been officially released yet—let’s start there. In its current state, Wave is pretty much a promise of really cool things to come, and people are riding that promise like happy little clams. But is it enough? Let's go back to the user experience before enterprise method that Google usually practices.

From an enterprise point of view comes Ric Opal, vice president of Peters & Associates: “At this point, it's not clear how Google Wave development will take into account things such as security, user directory and business policy regulation, all of which pose massive challenges…”

What do you think?

 
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8 Reader Comments

1 | XC Fan — June 12, 2009 10:48 PM

I think the biggest problem for Wave will be getting people to leave their comfortable email/IM apps and move to Wave. The real time/extensions/open source should help though.

2 | Mark — June 14, 2009 3:56 PM

It's all fanfare and speculation on Google's part…even bordering on arrogance. Reinvent communications with email/im integration and the ability to reply inline? Hahahah, give me a break…

Nobody will care in the business world or in the consumer world. I repeat, nobody. Why? Because nobody is sitting at their computers saying, you know what, I really wish I could reply just to this block of text in the thread. Nobody is banging down the doors requesting that their threaded conversations become shareable.

There are thousands upon millions of applications based on email, based on well-established standards and protocols. If Google thinks that with yet another amateurish, pastel-overladen product, they will revolutionize the world, they really have become too big for their bridges…

3 | Paramendra Bhagat — June 15, 2009 2:51 PM

http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2009/06/five-blind-men-and-google-wave.html

4 | George Webb — June 16, 2009 3:18 PM

The simple idea of “conversations” greatly simplified my email inbox in switching from outlook to gmail. All responses were collected as one thread. Google Talk sessions are saved the same way in gmail. This is the next logical extension, bringing them together. Imagine this thread accessible to everyone without having to come to the site. You can read the more cogent comments in the conversation before adding to the discussion. I don't see why this convenience is a cause for negative emotion. We have a bid we are all working on, great, we share the same document and conversations rather that emailing documents and having conversations in the round. Simple to me.

5 | Garry — June 23, 2009 9:36 AM

Google wave is more of personal use rather than enterprize boy. Now being an open source, hopefully dev world could come up with storm from a light wave.

6 | Anthony — June 25, 2009 7:48 PM

Mark,

I think you're missing the point. Wave isn't just about IM/email. Wave also includes document and form sharing. This means application building inside your IM/email/word processor/spreadsheet program. We're talking about replacing MS Office here.

Google already has the tools. Wave just brings them together and makes them usable from one interface.

Saying no one will care that they can get everything (docs, forms, applications) from a remote secure browser on their phone/pc in the business world is like saying that they wouldn't want email/contacts on their blackberry.

7 | Nick — July 7, 2009 3:34 PM

I just spent the past 90 minutes watching the video of the introduction of Wave. at first I was a bit skeptical, but after a while things just seemed to fall into place. I work in corporate communications for a large financial firm and I can see how Wave would revolutionize the way to gather, edit, distribute information.

Currently we have business partners that submit news or content requests into a database (powered by Lotus notes). The content is reviewed by our news editors and many times send back and forth between several different parties. once a final version of the document is ready, the editing team attachest the updated file to the database and passes request on to our publishing team. The publishing team then extracts the word file, pulls it into Dreamweaver to format it properly for the web and then dumps it into the content management system.

We typically end up with 3-5 different word docs and html page and more. Wave's ability to support third party plugins could allow for Wave to difectly communicate with the CMS. The collaborative features that Google is planning on implementing would be a huge time saver and make all of our jobs a lot easier.

8 | Dagfinn — December 10, 2009 12:52 PM

IMHO, Google Wave in the enterprise is all about providing business context into the processes requiring collaboration.

E-mail is still, 40 years its conception, the Enterprise's primary tool for communication and collaboration.

More about this on my presentation on “Why and how the Enterprise can harness the power of Google Wave” available at
http://www.slideshare.net/dparnas/why-and-how-the-enterprise-can-harness-the-power-of-google-wave

Regards
Dagfinn

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