June 02, 2009

Personally, I'm very excited by Wave. I think it's going to be great (as in Google usually make quality stuff when they put their minds to it, I think it will be free enough to use with good conscience, and it will be uber-powerful)

I'm also willing to bet on the ultra-conservatism of the majority of users, and predict that they WON'T GET IT. This will have made hardly a dent on either email or M$ Office use by this time next year. Most people will be confused (rather than delighted) by the blurring of email, document editing and real time conversation. Early adopters won't be able to use it to send emails or share documents with late-adopters, so hardly anyone will be able to use it in enterprises etc.

The people who'll be most affected by this are 37 Signals, Huddle, SocialText etc. who are trying to sell web-based project management or enterprise blogs and wikis to early adopters. It's gonna be a tsunami in that market.

Nevertheless, can't wait to play with it.

Couple of interesting posts

3 comments:

John Powers said...

I have been so looking forward to you weighing in on Wave. When I watched the demo I was very excited by the notion of "email as it should be."

I had just spent an evening with a group f friends and the subject of social software came up--they don't get it and in fact seem hostile to it. This bums me out because I would like more collaboration with them and to see more collaboration between my friends.

After the initial excitement subsided, I suppose my thoughts were moving towards your prediction. Still, I think the hook Google has come up with around email, gives it a good shot of widespread adoption here in the USA.

Some of my collaboration is with folks in Africa. Wave isn't going to help much in this case. But I'm sick of opening Word documents, and I can't help but think that the ease of collaborating on documents via Wave would be quickly appreciated.

Jerry Jaz said...

I too see the angry pushback. Some of my friends are bewildered by the choices and in-intuitive design. I was very excited to watch the video presentation of Waves.

Composing said...

Yeah, Google's best hope would be to slide it in as a GMail "upgrade", just like their instant messaging system.

We'll probably see an "open a wave for this email" button accompanying emails sooner or later.

John, as for Africa, haven't any of the free wiki hosting services been any good? Or are there privacy issues?