htulog

Last week Google announced a developer version of a new product. Google Wave’s proposition is to become an online collaboration and communication tool. Certainly something some of us have heard before, as our friend Max Ugaz notes recalling Lotus Notes’ origins. While it represents a nice move ahead on tightly integrating Google’s actual offering with Google Apps and an advancement on the design of a product conceived and designed for today’s needs and mindsets, I’ll elaborate a bit on what this might represent for business.

What it represents

As Wave’s technical head asserts Wave is intended to become rather than a product a platform and a protocol. By open-sourcing it’s source code Google is expecting to foster an ecosystem in the same fashion Linux have done on operating systems. Google I/O was the right venue for this announcement. Thousands of developers and smart people looking for something interesting and challenging will start to build things on top of it. This will produce a important number of products with different business models and targeted markets.

How business can adopt it

An opportunity window is presented to business who want to develop solutions and for those who are willing to bump productivity, improve time-to-market timing for product and services creation, even customer relationship and many others customer-oriented aspects can take advantage and benefit of this.

Are we ready?

Collaboration is something not many organizations completely understand and fully practice. It’s has a lot less to do with technology than with business culture, leadership and human attitude. Often organizations who do have strong internal culture and process definition take a lot more advantage of tools supporting their activities. By the time Lotus Notes appeared it offered new ways for boosting collaboration, it wasn’t just Email, as some missunderstood. However, then Microsoft came with an offering that was a lot more simple and offered just message exchanging. Savvy orgs adopted Lotus and built on top of it. Today, the story seems to start again. I’m confident that orgs who do have a strong culture will quickly move to such technology but the others, which still might be transitioning to something such a hosted or cloud services, will have to strike and their competitiveness will slow down.

I’m adventuring to elaborate on this because collaboration isn’t a techonology it’s a mindset and attitude. Techonology always will be subordined to people’s mindset. That’s why we have an ecosystem with many different offerings. It’s a matter of how people sees and understand their world rather than the current offering. For Wave the scenery today is different, N-genders and digital natives are taking more important roles in society, this could be the key for orgs to switch from old paradigms to a world seen by today’s inhabitants.