Joel Pinkham

Probably the most cliched topic in blogs over the last week and I’m pretty late on the uptake. But how could I not write about it?

When I first heard things about Wave I was sceptical of revolution, but new it had to be good coming from Google.

I’m going to assume you know enough about what Google Wave is before I have my rant, if you don’t then I strongly suggest you see the very, very short (1 hour, 20 minutes) video on YouTube about it (embedded below).

In short, it reinvents the way people communicate pulling together email, instant messaging, social networking plus any kind of sharing and collaboration into one place. Our as they describe it “What would email look like if it was invented today?”

It looks pretty amazing, I gasped with impressiveness multiple times throughout the video and I’m a nerd.

So what challenges do I speak of?

For it to become truly revolutionary, it needs to replace the way we do business. The corporate world will be the main thing that slows down Google Wave spreading. If we use it at work, people have to know how to use it.

Firstly there’s the IT Managers

These are the people that Microsoft thrive on, and Google are yet to crack. The almighty Corporate IT Manager. Most of these guys sit in Microsofts back pocket, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a kickback system in place.

While we are progressing in tech savvyness,  the majority of people are still afraid of change when it comes to technology. Google Wave means huge change to everyday work, which will upset a lot of people. IT Managers always try to make everything smooth, and think that if they’re unnoticed then they’re doing a good job.

I don’t think they’ll have the balls to adopt Wave for a long, long while (which in tech years would be at least 4 years).

Enterprise providers who won’t go down without a fight

Google Wave will remove the need for private network links, software licensing, powerful computers and servers. This will piss a lot of companies off, a lot of big companies who won’t go down without a fight. Not sure how they will justify their costs, but I’d say if the likes of Microsoft, Verizon, Cisco and IBM banded together to keep things they way they are, they won’t be a pushover.

So what is so great about Wave anyway?

There’s too much to talk about, just watch the video.

Tags: google, google wave

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. 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.