Google Wave: Game Changer or Niche Product?
First off, from what I’ve seen so far Google Wave is an absolutely ingenious product. It blends different technologies together to create a very robust collaboration environment. The Google team believes that Wave could eventually replace email. However, I’d argue that Google Wave will be more of a niche product due it’s high-level of complexity.
What is Google Wave?
Watching the following presentation is the easiest way to answer this question, but essentially it’s a mash-up of email, instant messaging (IM) and wikis. Online collaboration and communication are the primary functions of Google Wave.
In the enterprise context, Wave could play a very important role in capturing collective intelligence and facilitating communication as well as being used as a collaboration tool. Obviously, these are all very important things which many companies currently have trouble doing. Current technologies such as SharePoint offer some tools for accomplishing these tasks but are generally not being utilized.
Who will use Google Wave?
I believe that the Google Wave users will be tech savvy people who work in a project based environment. IT project teams will be the biggest user group and will use Wave to collaborate on creating requirements, design documentation and project plans.
I believe that Wave’s high complexity will prevent it from being widely adopted by enterprises and consumers as a whole.
If we look at other technologies such as Twitter, email, blogs and wikis we can observe an important trend. Technologies with low levels of complexity tend to be more widely adopted than technologies with higher levels of complexity. Figure 1.0 is a back-of-the-envelope estimation of complexity levels and adoption rates of various communication technologies.
Why is this the case? Lower levels of complexity create a larger pool of potential users because there are more people who have the technical abilities required to use the technology. More users increase the positive network effects of a given technology which further drives adoption rates.
I believe that Google Wave’s high complexity level means that the pool of potential users will be small—limiting adoption rates. I believe Wave will be a successful niche product. Will Google be satisfied with that? Considering they have publicly mused that Wave may one day “replace email”, I think not.
Tags: Google, Innovation, Web 2.0