By Eric Harlan
Published: June 1, 2009
Updated: June 1, 2009
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UPDATE : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

 

 

So Google Wave keynote hit the streets last week at Googles I/O, and there’s been a lot of buzz about the product. In this post I’d like to make some parallel connections to SharePoint and the new Google Wave.

What is I.T. like some sort of boring scary movie? Why is every product that comes out that does something similar as another labeled an “{Application name here} Killer”?  Let’s be honest, it’s been on both sides of the road here. Ipod has its Zune, SharePoint had its Documentum, Iphone had its Android and WinMo 6.5, Google Search has Microsoft’s BING. Really the “killer” thing has to stop; nothing ends up being a killer anything.  Each product has its specific audience, and those folks will always be loyal to that product. The folks on the fence are the ones that are easiest influenced.

That said, in this nerds opinion, Google has only come up with a handful of “killer” apps and services. The first killer app of course being Google Search. They have had the market on search for years, when your product becomes a verb you know you hit the big time (“go Google it”), now that Microsoft has “BING” will that take hold of some of that space, probably.  It is a good search engine and as the algorithms grow and mature the searches will be 10 fold better. I just don’t see myself saying “Go Bing that”.   The second killer app, in my opinion was Google Maps.  It far and wide replaced any usage of MapQuest for me and it seems MapQuest has been unable to keep up ever since.  Street view was the clincher for me, even though I have been using it long before street view.

Now onto the meat of the blog post. A fellow twitter’r (@mrackley) said so eloquently in a twitter post. “Anyone who thinks Google Wave is a SharePoint killer does not understand SharePoint or Large organizations for that matter”. I couldn’t agree more Google Wave (as it sits right now because it’s open source) is not a SharePoint killer. I think it’s a very cool tool to use in small organizations (like windows live office) or in a design firm or something but there is no context to compare the two applications.

Now I’m not saying that Google Wave isn’t really cool, I love the seamless integration of the user experience.  But as it’s been said, it seems to gear more towards a match up against WSS than it does MOSS as a whole.  It has to be recognized that it doesn’t look like Google isn’t aiming this thing at the corporate level intranet space (yet anyway), this is like an ad hock workspace collaboration tool.  Again, right now. Who is to say that in 3 years when this gains steam and moves forward with user participation it won’t be awesome, right now it’s just in its infancy. See the theme on that disclaimer?

A few feature comparisons between SharePoint and Google Wave. If you don’t care about this feel free to skim or skip it all together and go to the summary.

Hosted conversation

Google Wave: The ability to pick a spot in a conversation and reply to that specific line of text, almost like commenting to a sentence or paragraph in a larger bulletin board entry.  The typing and injection of that reply is shown in real time for whoever is sharing that wave. Pretty cool

The SharePoint Response: Other than a very few instances where I could see this being useful in a corporate enterprise, I can’t think of only a few instances to use something like this. Real time communication in different geographical locations, or just working on a project together in different cubes.  So SharePoint doesn’t really do this; however it can keep track of specific comments made on either a collaboration workspace document or a bulletin board style setup. Would this be cool to have? Of course but I think we can expect to see some really neat things come out of Groove (SharePoint WorkSpace) 2010. So stay tuned to that portion of things.

Uploading Images into a Wave by drag and dropping

Google Wave: Uploading pictures by drag and drop right into a works space that’s neat.   The ability to drag photos right into a “Wave” and have them viewable in real time (while the actual photo is being uploaded)

The SharePoint Response:  Again the context doesn’t really apply; I don’t know why you’d really want to do this in the enterprise. Maybe if you are part of the design portion of a company and you’re collaborating on a project in real time.

I think this would be a great addition to MySites. There are a good bit of changes coming to Mysites in 2010 as well.  I don’t have that much information on it but, I still don’t see a real need for this functionality in the workplace outside of the novelty of having it.  Currently you can already upload multiple images by drag and drop or by multiple checkbox selection.

I would like to see the SharePoint image area’s cleaned up a little, maybe injected into a silverlight album or something.

Embedding API

Google Wave: Being able to drop Waves, search boxes etc onto existing web sites.  Cool idea but “Simpsons did it” I mean “SharePoint did it”.

The SharePoint Response: The use of dragging and dropping or importing web parts onto pages has been one of SharePoints biggest features. Granted this doesn’t apply outside of the farm. So you can’t just have a snippit of code that you can drop onto an existing web page (for example, I can’t go into the Sogeti internal SharePoint farm and push a contacts web part onto this blog site). But that’s probably good you can’t do this there is a huge security issue with being able to do this.

Besides that, you can always expose areas of your SharePoint environment external and push content via standard XML/RSS to your existing sites.

Playback Editing Content

Google Wave: Ok I have to admit the merged like play back of all edits made to a “Wave” is really cool. To my knowledge SharePoint or Word doesn’t really do this haha, I guess we have “comments”. I don’t know how viable this would be to a large document, wiki or blog. I guess the screen would have to jump around to show that area of change.

The SharePoint Response:  Bupkis well, granted you can see merged versions of a doc but its kind of hard to follow.  

Collaborative Editing

Google Wave: Again a cool feature that isn’t native to SharePoint. I can see it very useful for meetings or like a client proposal everyone on the proposing team to be able to keep fast paced collective notes.

The SharePoint Response: This can be done currently in Groove (Workspace 2010) as well as keeping blogs or wiki’s, however it wouldn’t’ be real time, needing a check in and check out. However placing something like live blog on a SharePoint page, (something like Cover it live) would cover the same functionality. Is it exactly built in? No, but give it time.

Spell Checking

Google Wave: Context spell correction in the browser. Pretty cool. However I’m not sure I dig the auto correction of context words, that could be bad when you mean to say a word that Google Wave wants to correct.

The SharePoint Response: Most if not all of Microsoft Office application has context spell checking. Word 2007 has gotten very good with it (I am a perfect bad spelling example). I haven’t used IE 8 too much but I'm pretty sure they have built in spell checking in the browser fields (like firefox) does.

Extensions (just web parts renamed)

Google Wave: Spellie, Linkie, Searchie, Bugie, Twaves lot of funny names but do they do the job. Of course, but SharePoint has already been to this point. Nothing really new or “killer”

The SharePoint Response: With the community outreach of CodePlex in place and a lot of free third party web parts available on top of the modular model of features and solutions SharePoint is extremely extendable and adaptable. No upper hand gained here

Workflow

Google Wave: Very infant workflow (bug tracking workflow). Granted this is all that was demonstrated in the keynote but it doesn’t seem like workflow more than task management and tagging

The SharePoint Response: If you don’t know what SharePoint can do in the workflow space by now feel free to dive into the hundreds of thousands of write ups and descriptions of what can be done in the out of the box workflows, SharePoint Designer workflows, Windows workflow foundations, and all the third party providers of workflow.

Rosy

Google Wave: Freaking. Cool! Translating in 40+ languages on the fly.

The SharePoint Response: Yes SharePoint KIND OF does this with its language packs and different versions of the same site in different languages that are updatable by pushing through a single change. Again the context of the feature is real time communication. This would be a area for Live communication server to look at, as are most of the real flashy feature sets we’ve seen in their initial demo of Google Wave.

Summary

Google Wave is cool, no doubt about that. I would certainly install it/sign up for it and give it a try, I could see this being very useful for small startup companies that want to keep costs low, but still want to be able to collaborate possibly over distance and time differences.  But this is Ad Hoc style collaboration, this isn’t structured content, this isn’t Enterprise level Intranet material.  There is no front facing web site applications, there is not publishing and management of content and text.

Really what I get from the product (and Michael Lotter would agree) is that it’s twitter, email, IM etc mashed together to streamline the collaboration space in real time.  That’s not to be taken lightly, that’s a cool toolset, however it’s just not the same as SharePoint, you can’t make the correlation.  Google Wave is really cluttered in my opinion, very busy and has a lot of stuff going on without a real clean line of distinction between areas and content.  That’s a hard sell to get past business folks that have a linear frame of mind and a linear way of providing content.

In fact Lars says specifically and I quote “We’re building this thing with live concurrent editing, and chatting and instant messaging and email and pictures and all that stuff…” that just goes to the point of where the scope and context of this application is at. It is real time conversation and collaboration, not enterprise level content management, archiving, workflow, forms etc etc etc. It also makes me understand why Google was shopping for Twitter for a while there.

They only displayed search briefly, they showed it being very powerful but no real information behind it. And what about all those Waves they were creating, where are all those stored, how are they managed. How does search work across those Waves.  I think there is a lot to be figured out and explored on this side of the Wave, I would think a search company would have talked more about this.

So again, the “Killer” apps references hardly ever hold water, have you ever looked at Google’s tools? There are like 43 tools, I use 4 and think only half a dozen are even worth having (btw hey Google can you increase the Picasa web limit to higher than a gig? Seriously). I think Google has been stretching itself thin for sure, I just can’t see where some of these apps are going to produce revenue. Maybe there just going for the claim that you can do just about anything with Google regardless if you need to or not.

Lastly, I think it’s important to note that this is a beta product just announced, as we see more user interaction and development this will grow (think Apples App Store, there’s a freakin app to do everything).  I’ll be watching to see if this takes the place of my Microsoft Office Live Small Business instance for sure. But will it replace SharePoint? I doubt it, maybe if I “BING it” I can find a more definitive answer.

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