Google’s Wave
We have typically focused our articles on Microsoft and related technologies. This one will change that trend a bit, as what we heard and saw is – in our view – significant announcement from Google.
Yesterday, during the keynote on day 2of the Google I/O Conference , Google demonstrated (literally) the vision they are heading towards, and they have called it – very appropriately – Google Wave. It has been a long time – since Application Virtualizaton (SoftGrid back in 2003 /2004) – since we have been so excited about how can we use technology to truly help the way we interact and communicate.
Google’s Wave product demonstration was impresive, and in our opinion, represents a significant leadership leap in the space of collaboration and communication technology. [ It is not publically available yet, but they talked about a release later this year ]
By the buzz around the web – we are not the only one that is as excited about this… Lots of tweets came through overnight and all day Friday. Just to mention a few sources you can read more about this:
- From my teammates at InfraOps:
Check this out http://wave.google.com/ – I predict this will either revolutionize email/communications or spawn a host of wannabes!; … - Joe Wilcox’ Blog: Will Google Wave be Microsoft’s Tsunami?
- Techcrunch’s Blog: A new Communication Platform
- VentureBeat: Google’s take on the future of Communication
I am sure we will be hearing about this for many weeks / months ahead – I
A must see video of the presentation is at http://wave.google.com
A sidebar worth mentioning:
Microsoft’s Groove product – which came with the acquisition of Groove Networks in 2005 and was the brainchild of Ray Ozzie – now Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer – had much of the same concepts and ideas (when we used it in our workgroup – we found it slow and with some significant limitatons)
Early this month Microsoft announced that the next version of Groove was getting a new name and it will be folded into the SharePoint product family. The successor to Microsoft Office Groove 2007 will be SharePoint Workspace 2010. In the announcement they briefly talked about the improvement including: make it easier to deploy and better integration/access with SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols)
Not sure if the improvement will be that significant that we can compare the two products, but something tells me that someone is working long hours to make sure this wave does not become a tsunami.
