Google Wave: Why it's so good and enterprise software is so bad

Watching the Google Wave demo last week and reading Tim O'Reilly's enthusiastic review, it struck me how amazingly cool Wave promises to be...and just how paltry most enterprise software remains.

Sure, you think: it's easy for Google to innovate. It has thousands of engineers!

Maybe. But I don't remember Microsoft coming up with Wave, and it has even more engineers. Neither did IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc.

Google did, and it started Wave with a small core team of two brothers, a core team that appears to have done much of the work gestating Wave to its currently demo-able state.

There's a very good reason that Google innovated Wave, and not, for example, IBM. Google has no incumbent enterprise products to which it must pay obeisance. Google doesn't even have a built-in background with the desktop that moors its vision of what is possible. Google, in other words, is creating an "innovator's dilemma" for the incumbent enterprise software vendors, entrapped by their own successful products and the need to appease employees and existing customers.

Google, in effect, starts from a tabula rasa, one heavily influenced by the Web and all that the Web can do. And so Google Wave is born, while Microsoft continues to churn out tired retreads of Exchange/Outlook, IBM gives us Lotus version 10,001, and Oracle works furiously to tie its collaboration products into its existing suite of heavy, "enterprise" software.

More depressingly, the start-up world of enterprise-software companies largely tries to mimic these old paradigms of what enterprise software means. Some do very well, but few break the mold and start again on what computing means, as Google has done with Wave.

The best the incumbents can hope for is that customers will buy heavily into Wave, and will come to expect Wave-like innovation from their existing vendors. This will likely require external acquisitions rather than internal development, and will also mean that executive management at the big software vendors don't allow internal politics to squeeze the life out of the products of incoming acquisitions.

In sum, Google Wave is much bigger than Google. It's a chance to show the enterprise software industry how to innovate again. (Hint: some of the best Wave innovation is yet to come, as significant parts of Wave will be released as open-source code to encourage add-ons, extensions, and other derivative works.)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[halfNakedPappy]

Another reason Google is able to innovate like this is because they tend to get out of the way of their developers and let them develop. Most large organizations are burdened with process and stifled by poor management.

[Simplicius]

Hi,

"Tabula rosa" means "pink tablet." I think you wanted to write "tabula rasa."

[gungahlin]

*yawn*

I'm pretty sure that IBM/Lotus was one of the first in this space with their Sametime product, it may not "run" in a browser but its definitely unified collaboration and messaging see: http://www.ibm.com/lotus/sametime

[danielwsmithee]

You're missing the point of Google wave if you think that sametime compares.

[paulej]

Yeah, it does not compare at all. Further, IBM didn't create Sametime: it was acquired and is the result of merging two companies' products.

[vchalana]

Matt,

I'm not sure i agree with your assessment of Google. Innovations made without a customer need or those that do not solve problem that someone is willing to pay for are fairly useless. Google does not feel the need to monetize their products so they can saturate the world with semi-useful "beta" apps. The money that Google uses to create these products come from the advertising that us hard-working entrepreneurs pay for their ad-words product. I would rather that Google gave me -- their customer -- something that increases my click-thru rate or conversion rate rather than another Gmail client.

At least the enterprise software companies are trying to listen to whoever is paying their bills.

Vikram

[vikinzer]

vchalana,
I think you are missing the larger point that while you may want something specific from a company, development which is entirely driven by customer demand will inherently lack innovation, especially at the enterprise level. Enterprises want predictability, they want up time, they want to not have to change. Change costs money, it lowers efficiency, and it causes mistakes. However, change is also the only way that dramatic improvements in our life, and our computing infrastructure can happen. So the enterprise serves it's own interests in promoting stability, and until someone small enough that they don't have the baggage of existing infrastructure creates something that is enough of an improvement to pull customers away despite the lack of establishment we get stagnation.

Right now Google is that company. Don't worry, eventually they will monetize their products. They have already begun to slowly, through ad revenue and through organizations paying to use their products on a larger scale. Once they have a revenue model to protect they will become the incumbent and someone else will be the agent of change. It's normal, and expected, and quite honestly the proponent of stability has their place, the dance as a whole is quite healthy.

As a final note, do you honestly think that finding ways to process the data that they get from users running their "beta" apps and putting ads in e-mail and news feeds pages, and everything else they offer doesn't increase your click through value? Google is able to serve far more focused ads to be based on the data in my e-mail than my searches, and it shows when I look at the ads that pop up in my gmail interface. Don't think they aren't doing you a favor with those apps. If you think that they you really have no idea what the power behind their system really is.

[rtripathi]

Veruu well said. Thanks

[pinkgokart]

matt,

i think most people can agree that google wave is innovative. whether or not it catches on as the next big thing is up for debate. however, to imply that companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle don't innovate is not only ignorant, it's offensive to their developers. taking an existing product and improving upon it by adding additional features, making it faster, more reliable, and more scalable is what businesses want.

you use Exchange and Lotus Notes as examples of "tired retreads" which leads me to believe that you don't even know what the capabilities of the products are. the unified messaging capabilities of both of these systems were not always present. how exactly does adding this functionality equal a tired retread? as someone who actively manages both of these systems i can tell you that there are in fact innovations in each product. if you want specifics the feature comparisons are available on ibm.com and mirosoft.com.

i just don't see why to support your statement that google wave is so good that you feel the need to unfairly attack these other enterprise software companies.

[paulej]

I was absolutely impressed when I saw the demo. This may very well be the first thing I have ever seen that could displace email. Not only does it do what email can do, but it does a heck of a lot more by integrating with all kinds of other web content. Further, it is fully federated via XMPP, meaning that the technology can be as widely deployed as email, with any number of implementations in the market.

If you don't remember Microsoft coming up with 'Wave', you don't have a very long memory :):

Microsoft NetDocs was many of the same ideas circa 2000-2001:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-112926.html

It never shipped though.

[paulej]

I think this is quite different. One might say that NetDocs is similar to either gmail or GoogleDocs, or perhaps a combination of the two. Wave, on the other hand, is not a single "host application" or a "software as a service". Rather, it is a fully-federated communication platform that builds on top of XMPP for inter-domain communication and other web technologies. As the folks at Google pointed out, anybody can create a Wave server, even building one based on the open source they will release.

[eadeguzman]

If I'm getting this right, Google Wave will only work if the majority of the email systems are also on Wave. Right now even GMail is only about 5% marketshare among all email clients... (I just Googled that figure so I'm not sure how accurate it is.)

Also, they say that they are releasing it this year... Will html 5 be predominant by then? How many ISP would have been "Wave'd" by then?

I'm just a bit suspicious of the timing. Is this Google's attempt to FUD Bing?

[slgb12]

Speaking of IBM look what they announced last November. Take a look at the architecture diagram. spooky.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_blue_spruce_first_look.php

[bananaphonerules]

Exchange tired? The new version looks rocking.
A little biased maybe?

I don't discount that Wave looks cool though.

[Harlan879]

Extremely clever, but what about security? What about encryption? What about the inevitable spam?

[jnferree]

A Classic -- 1-2-3 We Win the World

[SandpointGuy]

So the guys who did Maps decided to move on to Gmail+Outlook+IM, and this is the "next big thing"?
Yawn, what a boring app.

[sanjayb]

Developing enterprise software is very dull and boring. There is no innovation in it. Just do what works. It's safe and predictible. We can't afford to be daring and innovative. Cost too much. Our websites look stale and outdated.

[seanturvey]

So many people are thinking inside a little box of person to person communication.

Wave has the potential to be much more:

* Take cars for instance, each company could have a wave address for each car it produces. This would allow for cars to send in service reports, software fixes could be sent on the fly. The police would be able to wave the manufacturer and have it disabled if it were stolen.

* I could have an address for my pvr so I could set it to record a show from a wave. A friend could recomend a show and it would automatically record leaving it up to me to decide if I want to watch it even if I had never read the origional wave.

* Digital images could have their own address which would be encrypted into the photo so it would be impossible to remove. Not only could you track the photo's usage but any comments anywhere on the web about the photo would be waved back to the origional so you could see what people think of it.

* For a number if years engineers have been working on systems for vehicles to communicate with each other. This would help greatly when a car is about to swerve into your lane or is going too fast to stop at a stoplight.

Here is my concept using Google Wave as a platform.

* Each block of a city would have it's own wave address.
* When a vehicle comes within a 2 block radius it is added to that wave.
* Using the instant communications capability of the wave all information could be communicated including:

* Vehicle speed
* Vehicle position
* Vehicle direction
* Traffic light states (each traffic light would have it's own address)

* As the vehicle would be communicating with multiple waves, there would be overlap of information. This would speed up hand off between blocks.
* If an accident were to occur the police etc. would be notified by a wave. Navigation systems would be updated to account for the accident and reroute.
* As waves area stored, the information in it could be used as evidence for accidents, analyzing driving techniques and traffic patterns.

[svk1069]

Google Wave already exists. It's called Zenbe Shareflow: http://blog.zenbe.com/2009/06/02/beyond-email/