Google announced today that Wave, its hybrid email / IM / collaboration experiment is finally available to all.
If you’re like me, months ago you asked around of your Google friends to find out if anyone had any invites left for Wave. Then, after playing around with it for a few minutes you got bored and haven’t so much as glanced at it since.
In theory it seems to have potential. Once you roll email, chat, file sharing, and scalable collaboration into a single interface why not say goodbye to your old ways of communicating? Turns out that there are a few problems:
- With Gmail you already communicate in near real-time. You can even start a IM conversation or video chat directly from your email dashboard. When it comes to the whole social media slant Google Buzz steps in to steal some of Wave’s thunder as well.
- Google is never going to take over as the collaboration engine at the enterprise level. Blame it on productivity concerns, blame it on privacy concerns, or blame it on Microsoft, but Outlook and Microsoft Communicator are going to be hard to part with outside of small shops, start-ups, or forward thinking / open-minded employers.
- As far as I can tell, you have to be a member of the G-World in order to take advantage of Wave to begin with. Given that many folks are married to their Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. and aren’t going to jump to Google just to use Wave I think it will continue to suffer from a lack of adoption outside of specifically targeted project use.
I’m guessing that there are people out there that use it and love it, and I’m even pretty sure that it was well designed and works as well as any other Google application (mail, maps, picasa, etc), but I’m betting that it’s only going to continue to serve a niche market. Chances are, Google would have been better served by either giving out more invitations initially while people were still clamoring for it because now I doubt that anyone really cares.
With that being said, is there anyone out that makes use of Wave, or would care to defend it? I’d love to know what it’s really all about… in case I’ve really missed the point.
