Google Wave

[JesseK]

I just learned about Wave today -- there's a HUGE possibility that this will replace Microsoft's NetMeeting as the leading corporate collaborative work environment. It's all web-based, companies can put their own proprietary portals in it while keep the actual data private if need be, and documents literally come out of conversations. I like the idea of responding to individual pieces of a document, yet that conversation doesn't come out in the final product. Just wait -- as speech-to-text evolves more, meetings will literally take place at a desk without participants having to type 70 words per minute to keep up...

The biggest things I see for the engineering world are better Systems Engineering opportunities for collaboration across geographical work sites. CAD, Schematics, drawings, pictures, manuals, documents, illustrations, etc will all be possible in the future. Multiple people working on these things at the same time is critical, and Microsoft's answer is sharepoint -- which lacks the fundamental idea of being able to work on a document at the same time.

Eventually I foresee full VNC windows and/or videos into Wave as a new vehicle to take classes over the web. Eventually I think more remote control from various people around the world will evolve, so that (e.g.) someone in LA can control a different part of the same robot that someone in NYC controls.

At the end of Google's announcement and the I/O, they did concede that Wave's success is contingent upon the open source development community's ability and drive to create API's and extensions into existing communications mediums so that Wave will 'talk' with non-wave applications. So long as that happens, I believe Wave will catch on.