Claude Baudoin recently became an independent consultant in Information Technology and Knowledge Management, after 35 years as an industry practitioner of those disciplines. Most recently, he was IT and KM Advisor at Schlumberger, the leading global oilfield services company. As owner and principal consultant at cébé IT and Knowledge Management, he helps clients put in place IT strategies, software roadmaps, knowledge communities and knowledge retention processes, and manage their IT innovation processes and portfolios.
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8 Reasons Why Google Wave May (or May Not) Kill E-Mail
1 – Google Wave does away with communication and collaboration silos.
Every time a new collaboration medium has entered the scene, we’ve been faced with an increasingly difficult choice of what to use. In fact, we usually don’t make that choice consciously, or very well (how many times have you discovered in the evening an e-mail that was sent at 11:30 to tell you of the change of location of your 12:00 lunch?)
Google Wave merges e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and wikis. It no longer matter what “style” you use to start the conversation, it can migrate seamlessly as the wave develops. You can start with alternating individual “blips” (like e-mail replies, just a little easier on the eyes), then decide that you should all edit one of the blips, making it a joint effort, like a wiki entry. And when you do that, you might suddenly see one of the other participants typing in real-time, and you naturally move into an IM-like mode of conversation. And so on. You need to see it to believe how powerful this is.
2 – Persistence.
Once you start a wave, it persists and accumulates information. An IM conversation is typically lost once it ends. In e-mail, the information accumulation is by virtue of threaded replies, but there are three annoying issues: if two people reply to your e-mail at the same time, there isn’t a single message containing all three contributions; the thread needs to be read from bottom to top to be intelligible; and e-mail client idiosyncrasies, especially when it comes to wrapping lines, means that many contributions appear totally messed up once they have been quoted multiple times. Wave shows you each blip where it belongs, decorated with the avatar of its author, with “collapse/expand” buttons to facilitate navigation.
3 – Gadgets.
You can add a “gadget,” which is a Web part, to a Wave. They can be silly, entertaining in a social sense (adding a dynamically updated weather report for each participant’s city), or profoundly useful to an enterprise (the SAP Gravity tool is a collaborative business process modeling tool packaged as a Wave gadget). Some Wave gadgets will certainly evolve to become complete collaboration applications. For example, since Google offers the Google Voice service, Wave will probably become a platform for web conferencing too.
4 – Wave is social.
When you add people to a Wave, you are instantly creating a small ad-hoc community. Just like people are begging their friends for a Wave invitation during the beta-test period, people will want to join some popular waves. When you add a new participant, he or she can immediately review all the previous discussions (using the great “playback” feature of Wave), which serves as an “induction rite” into the club. Participants in a Wave will probably feel more “invested” in the subject than if they had just been CC’ed on an e-mail thread already started. When you invite a new person into a Wave, you often feel like you’re making introductions at a party, and your profile can be seen by the other participants.
But, at the same time…
5 – Wave is complex.
The initial mechanics of Wave are not that complex, but the process of finding and adding people, the choices about whether to add a reply at the end of a wave or edit an existing blip, how to find a useful widget (you currently add them by URL, and multiple grass-roots directory sites are emerging to provide catalogs, which is going to be very confusing), are all obstacles to adoption. The product needs to mature a lot before it will be easy to adopt by the average, non-geek, current e-mail user.
6 – Security and confidentiality concerns.
Wave is “in the cloud” (hosted by Google) and this will be seen as a huge risk for enterprises. There is a confidentiality issue, and also the risk that important information might be lost. Enterprises will want a solution they can host internally, as most do for e-mail or Sharepoint. Selling and supporting an enterprise solution is probably not the route Google wants to take. This might eventually limit the use of the tool in a corporate context.
7 – You don’t need Wave to kill e-mail!
Many younger people don’t use e-mail anymore. They find it too cumbersome, full of spam, lacking in immediacy. Instead, they already “micro-communicate” using Twitter, Facebook status updates, and direct text messages. They want the unit of communication to become smaller, not larger (a Wave can grow up to be an entire months-long conversation between dozens of people).
8 – Old habits die hard.
The final obstacle to the uptake of Wave is good old cultural inertia. I started using e-mail in 1980, but I still know some people (usually older) who don’t use it and don’t want to. So in spite of the convergence that Wave promises, it will probably not displace e-mail, IM, and wikis completely, at least not for a long time. But it is a very interesting development, and you should experiment with it, and make up your own mind.
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Also on this topic from George Parapadakis. I always like George's insights.
If you haven't seen the Complete Wave Guide, worth a look.
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Claude: vous avez oublie une raison..
Google Wave is Google, not Microsoft.
Google Wave therefore provides a free online environment that fits in with GoogleDocs (also in a cloud) and Google Calendar, as well as GMail and GTalk, are pervasive - so from a users point of view, migrating from email ans IM becomes a simple move, and for IT managers, moving users to Google Wave provides asingle, easier way to deliver mail, IM and collaboration , and since it is in a cloud, it reduces the IT management work, and increases productivity.
Now, all we need is a link for Records Managers to manage, classify, track, and archive Waves, and we are set.
Posted by: [email protected] | December 01, 2009 at 05:05 PM
I tried wave. I think it's still a toy. If they do not make it respond quicker to typing (why not gather keystrokes a bit?) it will even be completely unusable.
Like many new technologies before its hugely overhyped. 3reasons:
- The simultaneous typing looks very cool
- The invites-campaign makes you look very cool
- People like to hype something to make them look cool
Wave has another importance: I think that many companies and platforms will now finally start to make collaboration on documents and content truly possible.
Most documents that many people want to work on together, are serious documents where graphic and text quality are very important. Large price quotes and project proposals, scientific documents, research papers, magazine content etc. In that field true text collaboration would save an enormous amount of time, money and risk.
For such use Wave is too simple and too light. I think it would be a nice extension which will earn its place in the world and find its use in the world next to twitter, facebook, linkedin and many other socials.
Posted by: Bas Groot | December 02, 2009 at 03:19 AM
There is one absolutely critical quality that Wave shares with email that it does not share with Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, or almost any other popular online communication platform: it has an open architecture. The protocol (based on XMPP) is standard, and organizations are free to host their own Wave service, implemented by any vendor, just as they do with email. Rather than trying to lock users in, Google is encouraging competition with detailed documentation of the protocol and by releasing their source code under a permissive license. No Wave user need ever be coupled to Google in any way.
By contrast, nearly every other online communication/collaboration platform has a single corporate gatekeeper (e.g. FaceBook, Twitter, Y!, AIM). That centralization isn't fault tolerant, and it opens users up to exploitation of their personal information and other content.
Yes, Wave is still immature, and the only implementation available today is from Google. But I believe that Wave represents our best shot at an open future for online communication and collaboration.
Posted by: Rick Warren | January 04, 2010 at 05:09 PM