The Business of Software

I see a few folks on BoS are developing project management and collaboration systems.

Do you think Google Wave is a serious threat to your efforts, or just another potential part of the work flow?

Here's some info about Google's new tech.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave/
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

awesome! i did not know about that one.

From the Google website: "... coming later this year."

My first thought was, "hmmm, Google is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook".  It used to be called FUD back then.  But for Google it will be called "transparency"  :)

just watched the early videos. the live collaboration one was boring and i only got that client server operation part. what does it have to do with wave? how is it used? how do they manage millions of users?

now, the spelling system seems promising.

[ot]
that "deck of the sydney office" is noisy.
[/ot]

I think it's an awesome opportunity for people who are working on collaborative products (like I am), as it has the potential for providing a very powerful collaboration platform you can build on.  By hooking in to the APIs and adding your particular value, imagine how much work you won't have to do to get your product launched!

Right until G takes it away again...

Interesting, especially if one can use these collaborative applications with ones own federation server, so that if Google closes down this (like they often do) it will still work.

I'm feeling really stupid.  The 1 hour and 20 minute video is at minute #27, and I'm thinking this is really, really difficult to accomplish with AJAX, but why on earth did Google bother?

Too bad I can't see where Wave represents an improvement on any level.  With all of Google's resources, they have come up with a way to turn your browser into a non-verbal conference call, with all of the interruptions, confusion, background noise, having to repeat everything over and over again because one person has a bad connection, arguments over which window to place over top of someone else's window, making everyone sort through everyone else's photo albums, watching everyone waste everyone else's time while everyone edits their tweets, blog posts, IM snippets, rearrange the columns on their web pages, stop to explain the big picture to the poor smuck with the smartphone who gets to see 10% of the screen real estate everyone with a widescreen monitor gets to see, ...

I swear Wave (assuming the Google People Down Under ever get it to work) will set back human communication by a thousand years.  It takes everything we do with HTML and Javascript right now, puts it in a blender and produces multi-coloured mush.  I can't tell you how many hours I've spent on conference calls where 20 or more people are staring at the same screen via Lotus Sametime, and if you try to make it a collaborative meeting instead of a one-way lecture, it will be a disaster.  And in the shorter video with the guy explaining how Wave can "transform" the concurrent insertion and deletion of characters in a client/server model, he says the main advantage of Wave is that you can interrupt each other.  Some progress!

So when/if we are doing project managment, collaboration tools, we shouldn't get freaked, paniced and sort of quit ?

> So when/if we are doing project managment, collaboration tools, we shouldn't get freaked, paniced and sort of quit ?<
I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over competition from Google Wave.

I'm sure there will always be opportunities to improve project management tools.  The problem I see with the collaboration metaphor for workgroup software, is that at the end of the day someone has to make a decision.  In some ways, group think is an oxymoron.  Thinking is solitary exercise for the brain, not a group activity like tug of war, where everyone coordinates their efforts. It is good to share ideas, but you need time to yourself to think about them.

If your collaboration tools require you to acknowledge every iteration of the comment/response cycle, nothing will get accomplished, because by the time you think something through, another comment/response cycle has already started.  For some of us slower thinkers, we end up missing several cycles, and we have to abandon our thought processes in order to keep our place in the meeting of minds.

Another problem with collaboration tools is the absence of hierarchy.  Good decision making requires that decision makers are responsible for their decisions.  In a scrum, mistakes are orphans who never receive the benefits of good parenting, but instead hang around the schoolyard, disrupting the structured activities of everyone else.