Google Wave may be a big deal for Google, but it’s an even bigger deal for Microsoft. It forces Redmond to step up at the very time it would rather run silent and deep. Correct that: those owners of the crown jewels who’ve guided the aircraft carrier for decades would rather ignore the impact of these two brothers and a product manager who moved Down Under to build what may well be Google’s realtime core.
Windows may be more protected from the Wave than Office, which must now confront not just a new feature set but a disruptive route-around of the core document formats. When Lars, Jens, and Stephanie demonstrated a Wave extension that provided robot-scraping grammar-checking in realtime, they put the lie to the common wisdom that Office was invulnerable to the Web. And in the process, they changed the monetization model for Office as well.
What happens when Wave applications store not just the deltas between document actions but the actions we take in response to incoming information? Let’s say the micromessaging stream reports some event that suggests a shift in interest rates, which in turn is noticed by a robot on guard for relevant changes to your financial position and assets. This in turn triggers a message that is sent to your broker, or a transaction commitment to buy at a certain level, or a pushed reminder to click yes to authorize the purchase of flowers for Mother’s Day, etc.
In Wave-ese, robots are Trackers. And in Track-ese, sharing those gestures is a monetization engine of unparalleled efficiency and value creation. Instead of thinking of your value as being generated by what you say or type, think of it as a stream of content, context, impressions, lack of gestures, and other high value information that those who’ve learned enough about you value access to that stream. Add the cumulative streams of the overlapping clouds emanating from your center — the ripples of those you follow and those that follow those you follow — and you have the next generation of discovery, a meta-search.
What follows is an appstore for gesture streams, with data supporting the predictive nature of the best of those streams. Today’s complaints about too many tweets and rush hour data storms are the early signs of markets for efficient triage of information. The payload/URL construct will lead to new versions of Google and other Readers that absorb and replace the RSS reader with dynamic socially-filtered robots that present only the most targeted information. In effect, Wave robots will be dynamic instantiations of socially-tuned rules engines, drawing on the services of Wave extensions to add processing and rendering to the output stream.
The new media will emerge from this primordial soup in short order, squeezed under pressure from accumulated information glut into the oil that the social engine runs on. How-To’s will become a combination of instructions and tests of how well the tasks are completed. These hybrid stories/tutorials will use the feedback loop to tune themselves for greater effectiveness, and the broader success of marketing those products among the social cloud will lower the price while increasing revenue and features. This is the feedback loop Bill Gates and company exploited in the Windows generation.
How the new Windows absorbs the old one is Microsoft’s dilemma, and also an enormous opportunity handed to Ray Ozzie and his team by Wave. Wave’s delta-driven XML streams are directly descended from the Groove architecture, and Live Mesh can be seen as a similar reboot of its parent as part of Windows 7 and Live. In effect, both companies are now at roughly the same place in integrating realtime into the respective architectures. Like Wave, Mesh started as a small skunkworks project and is now being integrated into the shipping OS under Windows chief Steven Sinofsky. Sergey Brin was equally clear about Wave’s trajectory inside Google.
Microsoft has great momentum and the firewall of inertia in the enterprise. Office is buttressed at many institutional levels, governmental, corporate, and legal. But once dynamic documents proliferate and business gets done increasingly across corporate domains, the traditional document types must adapt or corrode and disintegrate. Here again, the Wave robots look like cute R2D2s for finding the latest sales and Craigslist freeware, but enterprise extensions will start taking off once Wave gets the Apps green light. A dynamic document that hits iPhone, Gphone, and netbook in realtime will go viral with the same speed it rolls out of the various appstores.
Put simply, the Office team has no choice but to accelerate its move to the cloud. First place they have to jump is at the center of the desktop, with a micromessaging app. Can Outlook be reworked quickly enough to counter a Wave Reader? See how the mind is focused when you compare the two timelines? Google Reader reworked may not be quick enough for some of us trackheads, but all it has to do is beat the Exchange team. Unless a Manhattan Project is formed that works with a realtime micromessaging version of Bing to produce a rich Silverlight-based client with — yes, HTML 5 support in the very markets IE can’t currently support.
Crazy sounding, isn’t it. Right now the best browser for Windows and netbooks could be Chrome/FireFox, and what better way to stay in the game until a Silverlight/IE hybrid provides a direct competitor/complement to Wave/Chrome. Microsoft can compete with Visual Studio against Google Web Toolkit, and its army of .Net developers can port their enterprise apps to Silverlight and add realtime extensions. If they don’t, they’ll move to Wave and its greener realtime pastures. This is the language Microsoft understands: developers, developers, developers.
Good post Steve – And, I could actually understand it ;-)
agreed. nice post, Steve. No razors either! ;-P
Wave/Mesh are scaring the smile out of me!
“When Lars, Jens, and Stephanie demonstrated a Wave extension that provided robot-scraping grammar-checking in realtime, they put the lie to the common wisdom that Office was invulnerable to the Web.”
That’s MP?? A simple edit window of Firefox can spell-check, which makes me wonder what makes Wave that much different from Facebook Framework, M$ Live Framework, MySpace APIs and so on? It seems every one has an over-hyped Web framework that never really matters and now Google jumps on the same bandwagon. Last year it was APP Engine which was hyped up as the killer cloud environment, well, whatever happened to that killer? It’s all silence recently. Google needs to deliver real meat instead of gimmick hypes all the time. It starts to feel like the Java all over again, beautiful talk w/ no meaningful follow-ups.
vitor, suggest you go watch the video. What they demo’d was game-changing. The APIs you list look like a squirt gun next to google’s nuke. They’ve already published the white papers and provided developers with a sandbox.
This is not an API. It’s a protocol. Shrug it off at your own peril
A seminal work comparing core technologies from the 2 giants that matter. The outcome will guide 100’s off millions of pent up spending in the enterprise.
Steve – love your energy and style. This will be fun to watch when it is delivered. I am a bit suspect in believing G has an exclusive on an obvious space, but who knows.
- scott -
It’s nice to read thoughtful commentary on the implications of Wave instead of someone just trying to nit pick alpha quality software.
This could have a huge impact in the Content Management Systems market. Especially if Google transitions Apps to Wave and instantly start with tens of millions of users.
Last year when Live Mesh was demoed at the Azure announcement, Ray Ozzie said that ‘an open source product using a protocol such as XMPP could be competition’…
and so it is :-).
Great vindication for the XMPP folks who’ve spent years trying to tell people that it was always much more than just about chat…
- Bill
Steve, I have another thought, but you need to finish it for me. Somehow, what I noticed in trying Bing is connected to all this. In Bing, I found information about myself that was quite real time, quite relevant, and pretty shocking, since I had forgotten a lot of it was out there, although I’m trained in the transparent life.
So there is a stream of gestures that either MSFT or GOOG can and will take advantage and possesion of. This raises many questions in my mind.
Coffee?
Nice Post Steve.
Its a api, its a protocol..
Its a big leap in the collaboration and real time communication space. With open sourcing it, Google has opened the doors for much more innovations and contributions from the open source community.
~Lokesh
What I like about Steve Gillmor is he always makes me think. This piece doesn’t resonate as much, mostly because he frames it as a winner-take-all contest between Google and Microsoft, and his examples of how Microsoft can compete don’t make sense to me.
If I were Microsoft, I would embrace, extend and embed Wave everywhere. What I wouldn’t do is try to come up with something new/better/different, especially if it’s proprietary. No one will trust Microsoft on anything like that. Maybe enterprises, but open source, open access is where we’re headed.
As with Twitter, the big question is how this gets monetized. With widespread adoption of Google Wave, there have to be opportunities for Google, Microsoft and companies we’ve never heard of.
> Crazy sounding, isn’t it.
No, not at all actually. It sounds like the first shoe of the next big thing dropping. Great analysis, Steve. Please keep it up, and more podcasts if at all possible, I really miss them.
I think Wave will have a serious impact on product directions for both Msft MOSS and IBM/Lotus Domino – to the enterprise customer’s benefit. I think you were dead on about strategy; however, I think enterprise thinks quite differently and not as quickly. They’re still learning Web 2.0.
While Microsoft has their gunsights on the remaining 25M Domino seats, they’ve probably noted that many of the document paradigms (and successes) are an adtaption of what Mr. Ozzie et. al (Ray, Jack, Mussie Shore, others (maybe even Bob Balaban (oh hi bob!)) of Iris Associates and Lotus created. The principle difference being the document store is now a directory with XML versus a single object-oriented database. The DNA? Unids are similar. Parent child relationships are similar. Security inheritance different (for some reason.) Near instant, authenticated, communications with stateful client sessions.
What Google must remember is that within the enterprise, IT has to support the nearly 100% connected user. The nearly part is what’s going to get you – they’re the Information Workers.
(Guys, you can have a protocol but without a server and APIs, there’s no way to leverage it.)
Regardless, all of this is going to be a GREAT DEAL OF FUN!
This negative WAVE with TWIT – just step away from the plate – LEO is bigger then u.