Google Wave– More than just a mash-up of messaging and email

Google is helping redefine online communication and collaboration via Google Wave.  With all the hype surrounding it, I was pretty excited to get the invite and try it out. My first impression is that it looks like a remodeled version of gmail+gchat, not necessarily even a better one and and that’s it. Nothing seemed particularly amazing about it.  However, in the context of Google’s wider strategy targeting businesses, this could be the tsunami that wipes out the old way of doing business.

 Organizations that have switched to Google can already use gmail for their email needs, Google Docs for their word processing, presentation and spreadsheet needs (well almost), and Google Calendar to set up events. The one critical piece that was missing was a rich framework to enable various forms of collaboration.  Google Wave provides exactly that.  The out of the box Google Wave provides a rich interface to collaborate effectively with many in real-time or asynchronously over a period of time.  This facility can however be extended for all types of interactions. For example, a company in Australia extended Google Wave to support a collaborative business process modeling framework, where participants can collaborate with each other as they work through flushing out a large scale process model.  At any given point in time there could be one or more people working on the model. 

 Adoption is not large scale yet, given the nascent status of some of google’s technology. However, given time and some much needed enhancements (to be covered in a different post) more and more meaningful extensions will be developed and more and more businesses will join the wave to conduct their business.

Related posts:

1. Google Docs – Microsoft Office Killer By Next Year?