Google announced last week it would end development of Wave as a stand-alone collaboration tool. While Wave was ground-breaking in terms of delivering an ability for groups of individuals to collaborate in real time around a mix of text and rich media, governance concerns limited adoption by those who could most benefit: business users.
Google did say it would continue development of Wave, but instead seek to integrate it into its other applications. As a model for future collaboration, Wave did make a wave. But its greatest impact will be to drive co-authoring capabilities into other collaboration applications.
Google announced several new features for Google Docs today. Most of these are designed to improve the UI to take advantage of advancements in browser capabilities, but the most notable new feature is the ability for up to 50 individuals to simultaneously collaborate on a document in real-time. This feature shows the first application of Buzz technology into Google Docs and leaves one anticipating the integration of DocVerse to enable co-editing of Microsoft Office documents directly within Google Docs.
There’s a lot of speculation on various blogs about Google’s acquisition of DocVerse, a startup founded by former Microsoft employees to enable co-authoring of MS Office documents. Most of the discussion has focused on the potential of Google integrating DocVerse into its apps portfolio, but given the chasm in terms of feature/functionality between Google Apps and Microsoft Office, it doesn’t seem that the idea of a MS Office and Google App user co-authoring a document is going to be feasible anytime soon.
Instead, is it possible that Google aims to position DocVerse as a hosted alternative to SharePoint for workgroup collaboratation, delivering a Wave-like functionality that integrates with Microsoft Office as a separate service from its Apps? The universe of Microsoft Office users is a massive order of magnitude larger than those using Google Apps, or who will use Google Apps in the next few years, so why not challenge Microsoft’s two big growth engines - SharePoint, and the forthcoming Office Live Workspace to provide a real-time collaboration capability compatible with Microsoft’s desktop suite?
Google today announced “Buzz“, their attempt to merge the worlds of social computing with e-mail. Buzz adds social tracking features to your in-box, allowing you to see the social activity of your contacts. So what’s not to like?
I think the biggest issue with Buzz is its reliance on Gmail. Google makes the assumption that your e-mail contacts are your buddies, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve got a lot of folks in my in-box who are business or casual acquaintances, or whom are on mailing lists that I’m on, and who aren’t friends I’d want to follow. The people I want to follow are all in my Facebook account, but Google doesn’t yet connect to Facebook. If there’s a “killer app” that will move people from Facebook to Google, I don’t see it. Buzz may have some use as another social computing channel, but at this point I don’t see it replacing Facebook (or even LinkedIn).
Where Buzz, I think, has the greatest appeal is in creating a social community within companies using Gmail or Google apps as their corporate messaging environment. Buzz just fired a shot across the bow of all the social computing software or service vendors targeting SMBs. If you are already paying for a corporate Gmail service, you just got a whole suite of social tools as well.
There is one other problem, it doesn’t work. At this point I don’t see the “Buzz” link in my Gmail in-box, and from following various twitter comments, neither do many others.
IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.
We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.
Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….
The one we’d all been waiting for – ever since the Rasmussen brothers announced Wave at Google I/O in May, we’ve been waiting for some hard examples of the power that Wave can bring. Gregory D’Alesandre (Dr Wave), Product Manager for Google Wave ran presented three examples of Wave integrations from Novell, ThoughtWorks and SAP.
Every time you use any sort of communication technology you’re trying to achieve a goal, to get something done. With Google Wave the idea is that rather than understanding the “end goal”, users can start a Wave which can conform with the shifting objectives over time. D’Alesandre gave an introduction to Wave for the one or two people in the audience who haven’t seen it before. He explained that Google use Wave internally a lot and they find that all current communication technologies are a poor replacement for face to face interactions however every now and ten it’s better to interact electronically (he gave the example of a 12 person meeting with everyone trying to talk at the same time) – Wave enables this mass interaction without so much noise (although I’d have to say it does introduce significant dissonance as heavy users of multiple person IM will know).
The Wave team has purposely avoided giving lots of lock-down options to Wave – if you allow people to lock their content down, Wave becomes very email-like – openness and flexibility increases the collaborative potential.
D’Alesandre talked about Wave as a platform and invited their platform partners to show their offerings.
First up Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager from SAP who demoed two gadgets that SAP has built – Gravity is a gadget that allows business process modeling to be collaboratively built. See the demo video below;
Second up, Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks demoed the integration of Wave with a software development project management tool. I covered the offering in more depth in another post but basically it allows for tasks to be created relating to a project all from within Wave and have them reflected in the project management tool. As I said in my post – this integration doesn’t show much more than could be achieved with a standard email/PM integration.
And lastly Andy Fox, Vice President Engineering from Novell showed their integration using the Wave federation protocol – Pulse. Pulse aggregates multi channel communication as well as a list of relevant contacts – it’s effectively a social CRM/communication offering. It brought to mind Gist’s offering and, while it helps aggregate lots of data, it does little to ease the burden of the firehose of information. The addition it does bring is the enablement of visibility in real time – but it does raise some question as to the value of asynchronous vs synchronous communications.
Some interesting integrations… but yet again nothing entirely ground breaking.
So Larry Ellison took the opportunity at a recent presentation to go off on a rant about cloud computing. He basically thinks it baloney.
His points (such as they are, when you pull away the Valley girl inflection he ascribes to a cloud computing advocate) are these:
Salesforce and Netsuite have been around almost ten years, and Oracle’s world hasn’t come to an end. (So I guess we are supposed to conclude that cloud computing doesn’t represent a future?)
He’s tired of people saying that they have been ‘doing’ cloud computing for years. (Huh?)
Of course Ellison wants to defang cloud computing as much as possible: it is a threat. The spectre of Amazon, Google, and applications running in the cloud on top of someone else’s technology platform has got to be the largest long-term strategic threat to his business. To the degree that the enterprise wants to get away from managing their own hardware and close source software — and who wouldn’t if they can get security and scaling issues resolved? — that is the hard stop in Oracle’s future.
Google is..ahem…making waves… with it’s “Wave” announcement this week. At this point Wave seems to have created as much confusion as excitement. Is it an e-mail killer? A SharePoint killer? Or something entirely new??
As a long-time user of Grandcentral’s Voice 2.0 service I’ve been concerned about the lack of news/updates since Grandcentral was acquired by Google in 2007. Given the expiration of the Grandcentral domain a few weeks ago, there was real concern that Grandcentral was not going to survive. Fortunately Google has allayed those fears with the announcement this morning of Google Voice. Google Voice shows the clear potential to use Web 2.0 technologies to add additional functionality to traditional phone services by adding in an application layer between a user and their underlying voice services. Finally, after nearly 100 years, we’re seeing real innovation in the way we make and receive calls.
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Aug 9th, 2010 |
