The battle between video game console makers is in motion--literally. The three big console makers announced separate efforts this week at the E3 conference that focus on how gamers control their games.
For those of you who have been waiting for some really big news to come out of the video game industry, Microsoft answered your call with its innovative "Project Natal," a hands-free motion-sensitive controller system. Announced during Microsoft's annual E3 press conference, Project Natal seems almost certainly to be the culmination of several years of work by an Israeli start-up called 3DV Systems, which Microsoft recently acquired.
The technology, as demonstrated, appears geared toward allowing users to control games, movies, and anything else on their Xbox system with their hands alone, and without touching any hardware.
Nintendo had a chance for a rebuttal, during which it chose to focus on Wii Motion Plus. The idea behind the new version of the controller is that it offers enhanced feedback, what they called "physical reality." The idea is that the controller allows for much more precise, feedback-oriented motion.
Meanwhile, Sony's new system is a set of wands with glowing orbs on top, that allow one-to-one motion like Nintendo's original Wii-mote, and which also give tangible physical feedback like the new Nintendo system. Configured with an analog trigger and some number of buttons, the wand has one-to-one mapping just like the Wii Motion Plus. The glowing orb, which changed color during the demo, was integral to the positioning technology,
It's abundantly clear that what's really going on here is an aggressive play by each of the three companies to make their offerings more palatable to mainstream audiences, people who have traditionally not considered themselves gamers.
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Windows 7 to launch October 22
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Tech giants reportedly in DOJ recruiting probe
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Court orders Dish to pay $103 million to TiVo
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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.
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