Google Waves at the world of collaboration

Google unveiled Wave this week.  They were careful to present the initiative as an early glimpse. Essentially, Google is leveraging the goodness of content development and communications in a pure web setting. Anyone that has used Google Apps has had that Aha! moment where you realize that stuff works differently on the web. I know, we all realized that intellectually, but you have to admit that you really do have that realization when a bunch of folks are working interactively on a Google spreadsheet and you think, “hey, that was way easier and way more efficient than passing a r around”.

OK, so Google is an interesting position to expolit this new way of working. Lots of dough to invest, really efficient data centers, eyeballs, cache, etc, etc. They also have the ability to drive a huge developer ecosystem. They absolutely have the ability to disrupt the collaboration market in a major way.

Is Google the only firm thinking in these terms? No, not at all. In my role as a Forrester Analyst I am in the process of doing a product comparison of collaborative platforms, a process we call a Wave (ahem). IBM, a company that is way cooler than they credit for, provided a vision where the Internet is the collaboration platform of the future. They see their role as a vendor, to  adhere to interoperability standards that allow their products to be part of a broad composition of capabilites that come together in real-time to serve the needs of people in the context of what they are doing. The result is a palette of capabilities that can include multiple content generation tools, synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration tools all melding with traditional business tools and applications in real-time.

Google’s message is clearly around the convergence of social and more traditional task and document-centric collaboration to change the way knowledge workers go about their business. This is a cool and undeniable trend, but is it a groundbreaking vision on the part of Google? It’s pretty much SocialText’s mission statement.

I like and applaud what Google is doing and I think they have unbelievable resources to pull it off. It will be interesting to see when we next hear about Wave. In the meantime, a lot of other vendors are pretty darn innovative too. Apologies to the many, many that I didn’t mention here. Time is of the essence and I need to get back to my day job. Got my own Wave to worry about.