Wave Bye Bye

When you look at Google Wave, and the fact that Google is pulling it, I don't think so much about failure as I do about Google continuing to build intellectual capital (IC).

They were brave enough to take a chance at re-inventing how people collaborate and work together, it wasn't accepted by enough users and is being pulled by Google, but in the end, Google wins.

---

Google is Learning

• They learned a lot about user interaction design and how people might want to collaborate which they will build on.


• They built experience in user interaction, technica expertise,l development, delivery and marketing.


• They built technical experience and IC that can only come with seeing it through to production, support, etc.


• They built intellectual capital that will carry over to other assets, like Google Docs.

This approach and ability to build intellectual capital may allow them to outpace competitors like Microsoft who are on a much longer development and learning cycle, and who are much less likely to take risks like this.

This quote from Infoworld only helps bolster the point:

Wave's user-oriented features in and of themselves may sound familiar when compared to what you've seen in, say, SharePoint (formerly Groove). Some of the real innovation -- and the reason Wave earned so much interest among some analysts -- is its underlying architecture, based on the open-messaging standard XMPP. Technologist Jason Kolb (who founded Latigent, later acquired by Cisco) wrote an in-depth analysis of Wave architecture last September, which may shed some light on why the product had garnered much excitement and interest.
"In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture," Kolb wrote. "Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself."

Although this serves as a good example of how a cloud service can be yanked from under you (as I discuss in Risks and Challenges of Cloud Computing), it is also an example of how cloud computing capabilities are growing and learning faster than the prior client-server era (OK, I'll just say it, the Microsoft software era).

---

See Also:

• A Primer on Cloud Computing


• Advantages of Cloud Computing


• Risks and Challenges of Cloud Computing