Google Wave

The announcement at Google I/O that made the biggest waves was Wave — a provocatively interesting collaboration tool. Wave consists of a Cloud component — the distributed infrastructure that enables a worldwide set of collaborators to share a structured document (the "Wave") and a client component that actually provides the collaboration tool. It's really important to understand that Wave is not a demonstration why the Cloud obviates the need for a PC. The Wave client is implemented as a "browser" application (part of the Windows/HTML5  debate discussed briefly in the last issue). Wave wouldn't be interesting without the part that runs on your laptop. The most interesting criticism of Wave has come from Ray Ozzie. His comments at the Churchill Club were very thoughtful — if anyone appreciates a clever collaboration application it's Ray since he's been building them since college. His point is for most purposes Wave is overkill and much more complex than needed, comparing Wave to Live Mesh and its precursors Groove and Lotus Notes. We run our business on Groove, and Ray is right — for 99% of what we do Groove is sufficient.  In Live Mesh, Ray has pared down the complexity of Groove enormously because it assumes that the heavy lifting is done by Cloud services (permitting the client footprint to be smaller). To implement Microsoft's desktop/phone/Cloud integrated vision Live Mesh is much more suitable than Wave, no doubt. And there is every reason to believe that the Cloud part of Wave could be implemented in Azure and the client component in Windows far easier than in HTML5. This does not distract from the fact that Wave is one of the best examples of a "killer" Cloud app — something that will deliver real value (Ozzie's question is the breadth of the use cases compared to those that Groove or Live Mesh enable) and that absolutely could not have been developed without the integrating Cloud collaboration services.