Will Google be the internet's very own Concorde? Something that is used as an inspiration by hundreds of other succesful services, but ultimately a failure in its own right? Or will it change the way we communicate in the 21st Century?

1. 28/9/2009
Google Wave
Google Wave
Flight of the Concorde?

2. 28/9/2009
Google Wave
Concorde was a triumph of engineering. It dramatically slashed transatlantic flight times, offering
people great service to those who could afford to pay. But today Concorde is no more. While the
technology involved in its development can still be found in contemporary airliners, the needle-
nosed jet is grounded for good.¹
In many ways Google Wave could turn out to be a similar example of hubris. With a project of
daunting ambition, it would appear Google is seeking to provide an alternative to a swathe of
‘productivity tools’ that much of the developed world use on a daily basis: from word processing
and spread-sheets, to instant messenger and email; from project management systems and the
attaching of documents for amendments to VOIP services and conference calls; from apps, and
wikis to blogs and forums; even from your browser to your entire operating system.
All of these services are available through Wave. They have developed a whole new nomenclature
for these new activities, (blips, wavelets, and robots?) along with countless innovations that many
people even those with years of digital or technical experience, have found hard to grasp.
Taking as their premise ‘What would email look like if it was invented today?’ the developers who
brought you Google Maps have been locked in an office for several years trying to reinvent one of
the fundamental, and most popular, functions of the internet. And unlike the majority of
developments we have seen in the web’s brief history, this is a radical departure from existing
conventions, rather than a gentle evolution. However, whilst Google is not short of funds to
develop this software questions have been asked about the business case for such a venture when
the only apparent revenue stream to date is that created by users willing to pay for invites to the
closed beta version of the service.
All the components of Wave can, in theory by embedded across the rest of the internet, including
apps, and Google has recently confirmed the imminent launch of an App Store soon, which will aim
to emulate the success of Apple’s iPhone version. But whilst Apple shipped over 7 million iPhones in
the three months up to September, it remains to be seen whether Wave will manage such
widespread adoption, especially when the simplicity of the iPhone is compared to Wave’s
complexity.
Wave’s interface has been described as an inbox on steroids, featuring many of the services
previously listed, and is all presented in the Google aesthetic – blue and white, stripped down, not
trying to impress: however there’s only so far you can strip down a product as complex as Wave.
And indeed it didn’t take long for other criticisms to rain in: that the service acted like a
‘productivity sink’, presenting a bewildering level of interactivity across all of the tools offered.
Some of this is undoubtedly due to the novelty of the system, and people who adopt the service will
learn to manage their inputs to allow them to use the tool effectively.
A more serious criticism of the service derives from this difficulty of use however. Enthusiastic
users have even created a user guide to speed people through the steep learning curve Wave
demands. But other major developments in the web have been simple to use, reducing barriers to
entry. Most people didn’t need a manual for search, email, IM, Twitter or Facebook (apart from the
privacy settings) – so why do we need one for Wave? If it is to gain critical mass, Wave is going to
need to get a lot of people using the system and using it comfortably.
The internet to date has been inherently disaggregated, anarchic, and full of innovation from small
start-ups (step forward Wikipedia, Google, Skype, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et
al) which were then acquired by bigger players and catapulted into the wider public’s
consciousness. Attempts from the big corporate of today to redefine the internet by developing
their own offering (MSN Spaces, Yahoo TV, Bing, Google Talk) have not found similar levels of

3. 28/9/2009
Google Wave
success, despite the financial and intellectual resource that has been thrown at them, for reasons
that are not entirely clear.
As Microsoft was once the fresh faced challenger to IBM, so Apple became to Microsoft as they
grew, and so Google is now taking on the mantle of the large corporation that is struggling to
maintain its brand and its pre-eminence in the ever expanding digital world. Many of these new
entrants can be seen to have succeed through a ‘flocking’ behaviour – once a small number of
people have come on board, the surrounding social groups of people converge on the web property
to be with likeminded people. The problem with Wave could be that that it doesn’t have a big
enough perch, the complexity being off-putting to too many people for it to gain critical mass. It
could, in other words, turn out to be for the birds.
But let’s for a moment imagine where Wave could take us. Thinking back to the Concorde analogy,
what elements of Wave might become adopted in the mainstream of internet usage in the coming
years?
The idea of collaboration has been shown to work well through Wikipedia. But collaboration on
individual projects is still a complicated business – ensuring changes to documents can be easily
made by multiple participants and tracked back and amended further seems like a good thing.
Seeing the development process could be more interesting still, allowing a brand to better
understand how opinions have transmitted from individuals to groups. Allowing interested parties
to participate in the presentation of a brand is an area many marketers are looking at – and again
Wave can provide services that could allow this.
Wave also seeks to break down barriers to working across multiple services, meaning your Google
login works across lots of different sites that do different things. It’s been tried before with
Microsoft Passport, as well as the non-profit OpenID organisation. It’s also currently being
aggressively pushed by Facebook with Connect. But as yet a universal login hasn’t really taken off.
But it could, and that would allow a great deal more data to be collected on users through a single
source. This would have implications for the targeting options media buyers have – reaching people
in their inboxes, messenger tools, social networks, online newspapers and web TV stations, and
possibly even when they are working on documents.
If users are prepared to trade this privacy for faster and better services, there could be a powerful
opportunity here, but it seems unlikely that they will do so without some protest and avoidance of
the service.
For now, Google Wave remains in very limited access beta, and the final form of the service is still
being worked on. Digital opinion, from bloggers, tweeters & the like, ranges from admiration at the
scale of the project, to disgust at the ‘breathtaking arrogance’² of this ‘vanity exercise’³. Google is
already facing criticism of its ambitious book cataloguing project, and has failed in other areas
before.
It’s really too early to say whether this project will fly, the components used in less ambitious
projects, or be broken down for scrap, but it will undoubtedly influence people’s internet behaviour
in the future, and is one to watch with interest.
Author: Richard Dance
¹Adapted from comment on Om Malik’s post: http://bit.ly/8yYjn by E. Khodabakchian; ² http://bit.ly/1aBNek; ³
http://bit.ly/9ZKaN