Will the Enterprise Ride the Google Wave? (and what could this mean to CenterStage and Sharepoint?)

I should be blogging about all the conversations I've had with folks pre and post EMC World right now (to which I did not go for numerous reasons: (a) Staffing Documentum and eCTD related gigs  (b) Staffing a BRAND NEW Documentum installation (c) writing about Twitter for the mainstream media (here's a link to one of the articles that's already published) (d) other)), but  someone just told me about Google Wave; I want to blog about it instead. (The other stuff will come soon.)

If you haven't heard about Wave yet, here's the skinny.

Google says:

         What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Mashable says:

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

I know that many of you will want to know a lot more about Wave, so I've done the googling, reading, and rating for you, in case you don't want to do it for yourself. Here's the developer demo (WARNING: It's 90 minutes long)  If you don't want to sit through it, here's a summary from TechCrunch's MG Seigler.

If you're wondering why I think Google Wave has anything to do with Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Information Management, Workflow...(I'll stop short of collaboration because I hope that's obvious), consider how the look, the feel, the functionality and the overall Wave-experience might  potentially and eventually impact the way people work or might want to  work. While CenterStage does a great job on delivering Web 2.0 functionalities within the enterprise, Google Wave could change the way we interface with the web. If it delivers on its promises, then it will, as W. Edwards Deming used to say, "delight the customer" rather than simply give workers an interface that they already use as consumers (which is, in a sense what technologies like Yammer, and dare I say, Centerstage seem to do.)

On a more ECM-related note, Thomas Claburn of Information Week says that:

Wave also has the potential to blunt the success of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s SharePoint. While Google isn't positioning Wave as a SharePoint competitor, Gundotra at a press conference following the Wave demonstration highlighted Wave's openness as something lacking in SharePoint. Within a year or two, businesses considering SharePoint but worried about vendor lock-in may have an attractive lightweight alternative.

The other thing that I can't ignore is that Google says it will open-source a "lion's share" of Wave's code. Gundotra has already released the preview product to over 4000 developers. You can find the developer preview here, the APIs here, and the protocol draft here.

Why do I think this matters? Think iPhone. How much less cool would it be if there weren't all those independently developed downloadable toys.

The other thing to think about, and I know this from my reporting rather than recruiting career, is that  Gen Y and Millennial workers demand that their interface experiences on the job be at least as good as their interfaces off-the-job. So if Wave becomes widely adopted, it changes the game everywhere. True, this could cause compliance headaches, but Google has been more enterprise- considerate than usual in Wave's design (this from the Register)

While waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.

Enough from me, go have at it yourself.  A few short years from now, you'll be able to comment on my blog as I post it. We (you plus me) will be smarter than I alone. I'm off to recruit, I'll need brilliant folks to engage with.

Tags: Documentum, EMC, Sharepoint, Google, Wave, Sharepoint, Web 2.0

Comments

[shiningarts]

Although the “Tweet Deals” article published on New York Post is interesting, if I were in the market, I would rather use much more conventional deals like my own contacts or a professional recruiter such as Brilliant Leap just because I am more cautious as my whole career is riding on it. Anyhow, Google Wave is appealing as far as the front-end twitter battle is concerned. It has been really fashionable for the content technology community to focus on how to collaborate and present it rather than concentrating on enterprise content technology itself. In the advent of Google Wave and the like, the vendors who are not focusing on the core enterprise content technology are going to be affected greatly. As far as the Wave is concerned, I have mixed feelings because Google’s labs are full of “unhatched chickens” and I wonder whether the Wave is going to end up as “Wipe-Out” or“Tsunami” http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1603-Google-Wave:-Tsunami-or-Wipe-Out? . I am not sure what is going to happen to those content management vendors that are weak on content architecture but simply focusing on presentation layer in relation to the Wave. On the other hand, the content vendors that are built on a sound architecture such as Documentum could be able to ride the Wave and the like by building nice surfing boards as conduits/connectors to it. However, it would be real difficult for Microsoft SharePoint to mount any serious effort to circumvent the Wave in the future since it simply lacks a sound enterprise content architecture. A so-called tsunamic event may suggest that even bigger aftermath will follow: I believe the technology sector is about to experience consolidation on a big scale, perhaps in part due to the difficult economic situation which is similar to the DotCom bubble bust at the beginning of this century. Even bigger fish like SAP http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/04/is_ibm_looking.html;jsessionid=P5YYRYL4VQGZGQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN or EMC http://wikibon.org/blog/can-emc-remain-independent/ could be affected by the further consolidation—in fact some of them have already started as we have seen in Sun set into Oracle. If Google Wave gets successful, it will open up greater potential of mashups. The halcyon days of giant application software suites like SAP may be past since people can combine applications with their own mashups. Although EMC is spearheading Cloud Computing, it may not have the critical mass it needs to execute it on a grand scale yet. Well, when we come out of the other side of the economic tunnel we are in right now, we may truly see a totally transformed landscape as far as the technology is concerned.

[Dan Ciruli]

I'm not sure I understand this point exactly: "Google says it will open-source a "lion's share" of Wave's code...Why do I think this matters? Think iPhone. How much less cool would it be if there weren't all those independently developed downloadable toys"

The iPhone isn't open-sourced; Apple is a notoriously closed-source company. The iPhone does have a public API, and that's what encouraged people to write to it (plus it's such a cool device).

SharePoint also has a public API, and is also closed-source (and also has many third party developers creating products built on top of it).

So you don't need to be an open-source platform to encourage developers.

To me, the interesting thing about open-sourcing it is that, as pointed out in your quote from The Register, people will be be able to embed their own Waves in their own software. That's a radical departure for Google; previously, all of their tools encouraged you to put all of your data on their servers. Little surprise there, of course--that's how they make a bunch of their money.

I'm excited to see how this plays out, and why Google decided to go such a different route with Waves.

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