Google’s Wave

Took a peek at Google’s video presentation launching wave at I/O last week.

The engineering is hugely impressive – they demonstrated so many advanced features, all delivered through an HTML 5.0 compliant browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) (not IE),  that it reminded me of my visit to the Louvre or Musee d’Orsay last week when one has a room full of so many Van Gogh’s or Gaugin’s that one becomes ambivalent.

Available soon as open-source I think it certain that a rich ecosystem of extensions, wave servers and wave apps will appear and build on some of the radical ideas already built into the product.  Apparently the work of about 50 engineers over the past 2-years ‘down under’ just the name ‘wave’ deserves to make this a big success.

I spend some of my time building workflows with BPM.  Lots of forms, lots of email services etc.  These services, as well as polls, are already designed into the wave product.  There is roll-back/history, collaborative preparation of docs, amazing context specific spell check, real time translation, hooks for version control, in fact wave looks like a darn good entry point for ECM.  And this is in addition to the way email / IM has been recast with loads of great features.

For myself I’m interested in how I could leverage wave services within a workflow.  There is a platform here from which to build apps specific to particular functional need (the situational apps) since lots of the drudge communication glue is available out of the box.  Functional ‘waves’ available on separate wave servers dealing with specific needs interacting with individual / personal waves etc.  A wave field in other words.

However, in the UK, will Wave be enough to ween UK-plc off its addiction to Sharepoint/Outlook?  I’m not so sure.  Neither is there an appetite for open-source nor is there an effective counterpoint to the argument that MS Office users cannot learn to use much else.  Having said that, I hope the sheer quality of the creative engineering of Wave will begin to cause MS users to reflect the next time they are asked to cough up for that years fees.