reinventing email
My invite finally came along for Google Wave. If you don’t know what I’m talking about just watch this video. I haven’t had a chance to use it extensively yet as I only have a few contacts, but it looks great. More importantly it seems solid. This isn’t some flippant new GoogleToy™, but a deep new reinvention of electronic communication.
But this beta preview is just the tip of the iceberg. Email is so tightly integrated into the workflow of computing that it won’t be an easy task to supplant it. I’m hopeful that this could become the email of the future, but I see a number of hurdles before that happens. I’m not going to name names, but the initials of one such hurdle are MS.
October 23, 2009 at 5:17 am
I’d by interested to know why you think “MS” is a hurdle.
There are several hurdles that Google needs to overcome to supplant email. The most significant one, IMO, is that they have to win the hearts and minds of the coorporate world, and that is no small task, just ask “MS”. Google would need to make Google Wave so appealing that IT departments would be willing to throw away all their existing email infrastructure and spend large amounts of time and money training personelle in how use and support Google Wave. I don’t see this happening at all any time soon. If anything, small startups will start using Google Wave, but will also heavily rely on email because they need to be able to communicate with the rest of the world, which won’t necessarily be on Google Wave.
The only way you can beat email is to evolve it in a compelling way and/or provide a communication method that is fully backwards compatibility with it. Otherwise, they’ll only win over hobbyists and tech enthusiasts like ourselves.