Google Wave: A threat or an opportunity for Microsoft? Will we see a Microsoft Wave?
1 de octubre de 2009First of all, I assume that it is clear what Google Wave is all about. If you have clear what it is about, you will notice that it will not just be a “killer app”, but a “killer idea”, a revolution that maybe we haven’t seen in Internet since the invention of the World Wide Web.
What will Google Wave be useful for?
- Private use: organizing dinners or parties with friends, planning trips, etc. are straightforward applications of Wave.
- Office use: managing projects.
We all know how difficult is today the use of e-mail to manage projects. You send and receive tons of e-mails from the customer, the suppliers, the engineering partners, your coworkers, your boss, and so on. Some of those e-mails will have attachments with documents related with the project. You will make changes to some of those documents and send them back to the other people involved in the project. Probably you are using MS Outlook, Lotus Notes or something similar as e-mail client. You will try to organize all the e-mail mountain by folders, dividing the project into parts.
Now you receive a phone call from your customer asking about the latest revision of a document you sent. “Where do I have this? I have no idea and I have to give an answer.” You start looking deep into the folders you have; maybe you run a search looking for possible keywords. Finally you find an e-mail with the mentioned document attached. Is it the latest version? You are unsure. Many of us know this feeling. Managing e-mail is a pain.
Forget about that and imagine you have a big whiteboard in a room where you can write whatever you want. You can also hang documents, pictures, drawings… holding them with a magnetic pin. Also, your customer, the vendors, your coworkers, all have the key to that room and can use the board whenever they want to work on the project. You can update a document and all people will see it without you doing nothing, just because it is on the board. Your vendor can write down a question on the board about the product they are going to quote. Your customer can leave you a Post-it with remarks on the memo you sent them. That is Google Wave. And, of course, you have privacy controls so that not everybody sees everything.
This is going to make working on a project much easier.
And here comes the question about Microsoft and Wave. Are they going to support the Wave protocol into MS Exchange? Are they going to turn Outlook into a nice Wave desktop client? Are they going to embrace it because it will be a communications revolution or are they going to ignore it just because the idea comes from Google?
If I was a decision maker at Microsoft, I would already have a team thinking about it, implementing the Wave protocol into the Exchange server, and implementing a Wave client into Outlook (or on a separate desktop client). They already have SharePoint, so go and implement it into Wave. Imagine being able to see the revision history of a document embedded into a wave, integrated with the wave’s playback function. Imagine that you don’t have to download the document, save it on your hard drive, modify it and resend again by e-mail. Just modify it, and all participants in the wave get automatically notified about the changes.
Also, Microsoft has another advantage among enterprise users: most of them already use Exchange as a mail and personal information server. They trust Microsoft and they see Google as a toy. They will accept and implement Wave just because it comes from Microsoft, and they will reject it just because it comes from Google and managers see it as “a toy” or “another time waster” for employees.
And, believe me, Google Wave will not be a time waster, but a productivity booster for enterprises around the world.
Much of the adoption of Google Wave among the corporate world depends on how Google will market it among those users. And I also think that the future of Microsoft also depends on what they do with Wave.
