Google Waving

It's been one week since I received my invitation to Google Wave, and I must say that due to the lack of contacts who are using this wonderful platform, my experience has thus far been limited to experimentation with the interface and a couple waves sent back-and-forth with two friends. I will not dwell much on all the features available in Wave, as I am sure you will be able to read extensive reviews in the myriad articles circulating the blogosphere. You can even watch the 100-minute video presentation of Google Wave on YouTube, even.

What I would like to focus my review, however, is on the practicality and potential use that I see from this product. I am not a blogger, nor am I a social media fanatic, yet I still see myself getting hooked to Wave once it goes mainstream and all my friends and family start using it. The reason is quite simple, really. It brings everything that is communication for me under one roof. I have followed Google's moves very closely since 2002, and I remember when it stated its vision on communication when it launched Gmail in 2004. Back then, Google said that its goal--as part of organising all the world's information--was to become the world's communication hub. Of course, this vision seemed rather lofty at the time, after all Google had just launched Gmail and its success was yet to be proven.

Fast-forward five years, and you have a much-evolved Gmail service, a Google Docs platform that is increasingly eating market share away from Microsoft Office, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Voice. All of these have one thing in common: they enable people to create and share content, whether it be emails, documents, photos, videos, driving directions, or voice conversations. Google had, rather inconspicuously, built all the pieces of its grand "communications hub" vision. The only thing left to do was to integrate them all under one common platform. Enter Google Wave.

OK, so Google has managed to centralise all our communication and collaboration needs under one roof. It will certainly simplify our lives and blur once and for all the lines between online and offline, voicemail and email. Yet where I think it will have the greatest impact is in the enterprise and education domains. Companies and universities both large and small can build their entire messaging and collaborative software architecture on Wave, leapfrogging archaic systems such as Blackboard, Exchange, LotusNotes, and Outlook (actually, Gmail already leapfrogs the latter two). Moreover, the fact that it an open, federalised platform means that it has the potential to scale very fast and connect with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, ERP systems such as Oracle and SAP, and even interactive games. The extent to which Wave can scale is really only limited by the extent of our own imagination. It truly has the potential to become the most indispensable utility of the 21st century (yes, even more than the mobile phone itself).

So, that's my take on Wave. Sure, the look and feel of the product is sleek and its HTML-5 underpinnings make you forget at times that you are working inside a web browser, and it will take time to get used to new features such as "playback" and "mute". But all those things are merely aesthetic. The true juice behind this product is the power it has to change the world of communication as we know it.


By Mariano Montefusco (MBA Class 2010)