Is Google making Waves?

Google’s recent beta launch of Google Wave has created its own wave of opinion, discussion and excitement. A truly innovative product that has the potential to disrupt our thinking and behaviour around communication, collaboration and community.

What is Google Wave?
Wave is not just a new product or new service, but a fundamental new way of working.

According to Google, Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Is it more than email or wikis on steroids?
Unquestionably. Whilst it allows IM, blogs, wikis, images, documents etc to be grouped into waves, it is the real time update, and the way that these concepts seamlessly link and update that is truly innovative. It breaks down traditional boundaries or restrictions of those individual projects and re-engineers them into one seamless, open platform that allows us the User to determine how to use them.

Think of the Wave components as a series of high quality cake ingredients that allow you to create any type of cake recipe, with the added flexibility of being able at any stage of the process to duplicate, rollback, replay or morph any part of the recipe, yet still come out with perfect cakes each time! Compare that to current products or services that resemble more restrictive cake mixes – with different and arguably lower quality ingredients.

So has Google stolen a march on competitors?
I believe so. The Demo is impressive (if long at 1 hour 20mins) and shows that the impact on Consumers will be significant and be the driving force for adoption. The impact on the Enterprise is perhaps less obvious initially, as typically organisations tend to follow consumer behaviour once the technology is more proven or stable, but the ripple or waves into the Enterprise will follow, as Google Wave gets increasingly sticky and viral.

Why is it so disruptive?
The main argument is that it is a green field design – it is truly innovative and has been designed from the ground-up to be different. Other existing services and products are unlikely to be able to morph or to emulate Google Wave.

It is disruptive because it marks a new approach. This is not about Google creating a new product that will dominate or disrupt on its own – though it is likely to do both of those. It is disruptive because it is so innovative and because the Google brand is attached to it. By making the product Opensource from the start, the likelihood is that new products and services will emerge that utilise Google Wave very rapidly. The concept and the use of the Google WebKit (the technology used to develop the product that is in itself innovative and disruptive) indicate that the potential it is creating is huge. A good comparator would be the iPhone and the concept of the Google App. The app technology itself is not the disruptive element – it is the quality and variety of apps that are produced by third parties that is disruptive, on a standardised platform. The backbone of the App is the iPhone and iTunes and a similar backbone opportunity potentially exists for developers with Google Wave and the Google Web Toolkit.

Tom Austin at Gartner suggests, “The design may fail. Someone else may evolve and perfect it. In the end, what matters is bold innovation that addresses many of the vexing problems posed by current product offerings.”

It supports the latest thinking around disruptive technologies (see my previous blog on Information visibility). It now allows users to determine how they will work and with what tools. Google Wave breaks the constrictions of the previous few decades that focused on process standardisation and cost optimisation – usually by implanting “best practise” solutions such as enterprise CRM or ERP or even basic software such as Microsoft office.

In those generations Competitive advantage happened not because everyone implemented these tools in a best practise standardised way (although that was the goal and sales pitch), but because they failed in varying degrees to implement the best practise. Differentiation then was caused by degrees of implementation success.

Google Wave is truly innovative. It breaks down the concept of “best practise” or standardisation and focuses on the true driver of competitive differentiation – user discretion and information visibility. The ability to collaborate in any way imaginable, safe in the knowledge that the technology can support it rather than restrain it is truly disruptive to how we think and work today.

Google Wave to me is an impressive and disruptive innovation that breaks the mold on how we might decide to communicate and collaborate online. And as we get overrun by Twitters, blogs, wikis, RSS and other Web 2.0 concepts, Google Wave hints at an island of calm amidst this disruptive storm.

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