Google Wave Revolutionizes the Net’s Collaboration Scene 
By Sandra Sieber
IESE professor

While Microsoft was presenting Bing in a renewed effort to re-launch its tired search engine, Google (who has this issue licked) was counterattacking with a project that promises to revolutionize the way people communicate, share and collaborate on the Internet. The project is called Google Wave, an all-in-one formula that combines email, instant messaging, wikis, file sharing, maps, links and social networks both in real and deferred time.

Its radical approach is allowing its creators to claim that it is the email platform they would design today if they had to start from scratch. That is not to say that it lacks ancestors. Lotus Notes and Groove Networks, both created by Ray Ozzie, are just two. Ozzie is a pioneer in online collaboration currently working for Microsoft. His first product is presently in the hands of IBM, and his second product was turned into Microsoft Office SharePoint. However, Google Wave effectively presents a new, original, and ambitious outlook on online communication tools.

Google Wave is designed for use via web navigator, and its user interface is as exquisite and well structured as any new product of Google is expected to be, despite the inherent complexity of the vast number of elements it can support. It allows you to drag and release contents and users in each conversation (wave), simply by using a mouse. As is Google’s custom, it is an open code system that employs open Ajax, HTML 5, and API. This should once again facilitate the creation of mashups and new applications based on the new platform. These applications can be developed for business, tele-training, or producing collaborative publication tools for the printed media and their readers’ active participation... the possibilities are infinite. For now, at least, the announcement has raised many expectations among application developers, whose collaboration is key to Google Wave’s reaching its full potential.

"This will make current communication systems obsolete”, predicts Jens Rasmussen, one of Google Wave’s executive managers. It is still early to confirm this, of course, although the potential is obvious. The company from Mountain View reports that its new tool will be available at the end of this year and that it will be operational for mobile Internet clients. That means that it will almost certainly reinforce the options of Android, Google’s own mobile platform. 
 
The lack of parallel products from the traditional actors in this sector is once again giving Google free reign to innovate and potentially change the rules of the game. The company is not above playing rough, and the fairness of some of its recent practices is starting to be openly debated. Nevertheless, without these initiatives, the web would probably represent a far more boring, expensive and inefficient scenario. With Google Wave, Google is reaffirming its indisputable leadership position in global cloud computing technology by adding another brilliant option to its already extensive array of products, and online technology users will once again be the direct beneficiaries.

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