This week Google finally distributed a limited set of invites to its Wave collaboration application. Wave represents a fundamental re-thinking of the way people collaborate and is designed to break the death-grip e-mail still has on communications.

Wave has come up a lot in recent conversations with vendors and end-users alike. Vendors are concerned that Google will emerge as a strong competitor in the unified communications and collaboration market, while enterprise IT architects are still reluctant to embrace Google as an alternative to IBM Lotus and Microsoft, but are enticed by Google’s approach to integrating real-time and non-real-time collaboration.

I tend to think the real impact of Wave won’t be as much a mass adoption by knowledge workers as it will drive new features and innovations to applications including Notes and Outlook. Just as Skype introduced the world to UC, perhaps Wave will do the same for a new paradigm for collaboration.

Ingres and Alfresco have teamed to create an open-source alternative to Microsoft’s SharePoint platform for document collaboration and management. The Linux-based appliance joins Alfresco’s ECM with Ingres’ database services. Alfresco has long positioned itself as a lower-cost offering that also offers the extensibility of open-source.

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Two quotes immediately flashed across my mind as I started reading Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus, a key soothsayer at Microsoft, and Rob Salkowitz, a free ranger in the Microsoft ecosystem who occasionally wanders further afield. The first is a Kant quote: we see not what is, but who we are. The second is due to Alan Kay, a big name in the hoary past of my employer, Xerox: the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. Looking out and ahead at the future is as much a synthetic and introspective act as it is a predictive act, even if you don’t explicitly set out to introspect or synthesize. Microsoft’s visions of the future merit some belief simply because the vast energies of that 600 lb gorilla, channeled by those visions, might be sufficient to bring them about. Goliaths win more often than we suspect, because Goliath beating David doesn’t make the news. For you and me, this book is vastly more interesting for what it reveals about the strategic culture at Microsoft than for what it reveals about the future (which is interesting enough in its own right though). If Rasmus’ views are representative, and I believe they are, here’s the radar with which Microsoft is operating (this is a rough copy of a figure in the book):

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Lotusphere 2009 kicked off this morning with the Blue Man Group and Dan Akroyd setting the stage for a flurry of announcements around Notes, Sametime, Quickr, Connections, and Websphere Portal. Most of the announcements were evolutionary enhancements to products announced in the last two years with two notable exceptions - the launch of LotusLive and new options for BlackBerry users.

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Nortel today declared chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US and Canadian operations (follow the story over on NoJitter.com). Nortel has been around for over 110 years, transforming itself many times over the years. In the last two years, at least on the enterprise side, Nortel has focused on competing with the likes of Cisco as an end-to-end voice & data systems vendor, while differentiating itself via a deep partnership with Microsoft’s UC offerings and a growing partnership with IBM Lotus. More recently Nortel has introduced initiatives in virtual worlds applications and communications-enabled business process platforms.

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Microsoft’s announcement that it is migrating FolderShare to Windows Live Sync in December has touched off a great deal of confusion over Microsoft’s application strategy for cross-system and cross-platform synchronization. FolderShare has been in beta since Microsoft acquired it in 2005. It is designed to allow individuals to maintain shared folders across systems, or share folders on their computers with others, both Mac and Windows clients are supported. The migration to Live Sync provides feature and branding improvements, but maintains the same basic functionality. Live Mesh on the other hand is similar to Apple’s “MobileMe” to enable synchronization of things like bookmarks, mail, and contacts across multiple devices. At some point I’d expect them to harmonize features and brandings, but for now think of “Sync” as a file synchronization service.

With 11 years at Microsoft under his belt, it’s surprising to learn that Keith Curtis is betting on open source software to triumph over proprietary software. In his recent book, ‘After the Software Wars’, Curtis pins his hopes on harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to achieve common goals with increased efficiency, speed and less resource consumption.

Microsoft has not looked fondly at open source over the years, even claiming that free and open source software (FOSS) violated over two hundred of Microsoft’s patents. Recalling this mudslinging makes ‘After the Software Wars’ all the more ironic, as the author’s biography flies directly in the face of his Microsoft heritage.

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Now that Microsoft has officially launched SaaS versions of Exchange and Office, they’ve begun making plans to deliver the next version of Office via SaaS as well. Microsoft’s move into the SaaS space is in some ways reactionary, as they look to fend off challenges from Zoho and Google, but it is also going to create concerns for the hundreds of companies that offer their own suites of hosted Microsoft apps.

As a recent convert to OpenOffice I’m still not sure the SaaS market for office apps is going to replace thick versions of document, presentation, and spreadsheet applications, but I do look forward to the continued ability of SaaS-based office productivity suites to enable easier document collaboration.

This morning, the big news out of VoiceCon (news on the last day… yay!) was IBM and Microsoft’s promise to achieve true federation between OCS and Sametime. That’s good news for unified communications (although I have to side with the folks who wonder why “federation” is an acceptable solution, when “open-standrads-based interoperability” is really what’s needed). But it’s not news to enterprise 2.0 vendors and users, for whom open, shared access is table stakes. Think about it: When it comes to communication and collaboration, you can’t know in advance who you need to work with; you need to know that at any given time, you can work with anyone you choose.

Not much going on today related to Enterprise 2.0 unless you consider the cloud as a related topic.  After all, many of the Enterprise 2.0 vendors are building their applications on cloud-based infrastructure or delivering their applications via SaaS.  With Microsoft’s PDC Conference going on this week, today’s news focused on Azure, Microsoft’s planned cloud-based operating system. Here are some of the more interesting stories I found:

In this article the writer compares a recent memo from Steve Ballmer called “A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution” to 1995 memo from Bill Gates called “Internet Tidal Wave”, a wake-up call of sorts to the changes in store due to the Internet. “The Cloud” represents an equally significant turning point in computing and one one Microsoft’s Azure is targeted at:

“Ballmer’s cloud computing memo timed for election’s winner”

I also liked Art Wittman’s blog on Microsoft which looks at the cloud from a business technology standpoint. What does this mean for companies large and small looking at how they can leverage the cloud, and where does Azure fit in:

“Is The Cloud The End Of Microsoft?”

Did your company make an announcement or did I miss any significant news? Feel free to comment.