Google Wave to PWN SharePoint?
…for the medium business downwards, quite likely, here’s the current feeling:
Mary J Foley: With Wave, did Google jump the (Microsoft) shark?
Paul Thurrott: First Look - Google Wave
Twitter: SharePoint and Google Wave
Features
For the SharePoint features I see most small and medium size companies using… (as a SharePoint consultant), Google Wave may well hit the spot. So how does it match up against SharePoint? Here are a few things I can’t confirm are in the “Google wave product”, but features that may be deal breakers for potential switchers:
- Workflow (could be provided by extensions)
- Metadata on Waves/Posts (to emulate content types)
- Security – this is the big one, how to make someone a commenter but not a contributor to a wave? how to have the granularity of permissions levels?
- Microsoft office integration – well if Google docs/spreadsheet etc are enough, then this will be an awesome addition.
- Skinning/Branding – could be provided by a third party that wraps the Wave engine into a CMS/Wiki/Blogging platform.
Read on for some more devil’s advocate……
How to sell a cool Platform?
Many companies build awesome platforms that can be used for “anything” like SharePoint and like Wave. Unfortunately it is the concrete Products that you make with your platform that the platform ultimately gets judged by in public.
“…it’s pretty clear that Google Wave is the online giant’s social networking play, an attempt to wrestle away some usage share from services like Twitter and Facebook, obviously, but also with Microsoft’s surprisingly popular SharePoint” Paul Thurrott
Upside
I am pretty impressed at the Open source, Web standards, scalability and Federation Wave provides - It will succeed long term because of those things. If their Wave "Product" (concrete implementation) is good enough it will ramp up quickly in the short term also and pinch some people from Facebook and even Gmail. Its defo gonna hit mass appeal outside of business first, but will likely hit Facebook usage scale fairly quickly (if they replace Gmail’s engine with this).
Downside
As it’s strength is Web standards, there will be masses of free 3rd party plug-ins and extensions; Unfortunately I think by the time this is big (18mnths?) the world will be looking for something prettier with richer interaction. Anyone want to start a project making a Silverlight client?
Ideas
Gmail plugin – Invite the Gmaily User to have the wave interact with gmail in some way.
Itunes plugin – updates a wave of my most listened to Album and tracks each week/month.