Has Google, with its latest project, Google Wave, actually come up with the Next Big Thing in online communication, or is it yet another Googler vanity exercise? Wave is a combination of email, instant messaging and a real-time wiki — plus open architecture and APIs. Or as creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon put it, “what email would be if it were invented today.”
For now, Google is rolling out Wave as a developer preview and will launch to the public later. The company is looking for 3,000 adventurous, early adopter developers to “tinker” with the system and figure out “what else can we do with this?” And that’s where I stumble.
Google has a long history of launching or buying projects, only to get bored and abandon them months or years later. With Wave, as with so many Google projects, the company seems to be flinging things against the wall to see what sticks. No real thought has been given to its future beyond, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” When asked about marketing Wave during the launch Q&A, the Google reps said “We really haven’t thought about that too much.” What about advertising? “We haven’t thought about that yet.” What about competition? “It’s not something we really thought a lot about.” So what have the Googlers thought about?
Continues @ http://gigaom.com
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I don't agree with this analysis. There are plenty of google projects which haven't been abandoned and it's this spirit of invention which marks google out from its peers. As for the sales and marketing stuff – so what? plus the web has done a pretty good job of marketing google products without any involvement – google search did no marketing at all for the first 3 year or so
I think it's important to remember this was launched at a developer event, and the speakers emphasized that it was an unfinished product. At face value, Wave seems to have a lot of potential–A LOT–but it is fair to question whether this is going to end up as a real product, or whether Google is just trying to crowdsource development resources for their latest experiment. Google does have a reputation for bait-and-switch tactics when it comes to recruiting.
SOMEONE needs to fix email, that's for sure. Wave is what Unified Communications should have been. Hopefully someone will write a Skype plug-in for Wave!