Google Wave vs. SharePoint

About a week ago, I was reading the latest edition of SharePoint Daily (incidentally the best daily digest of SharePoint & Microsoft news around) and I read the Information Week headline, Google Wave May Challenge Microsoft SharePoint.  The synopsis went on to say that "Google on Thursday demonstrated its new Wave communication and collaboration platform at its conference in San Francisco, prompting spontaneous applause and a standing ovation by developers."  As someone who has made the big bet on SharePoint, I confess that this was an "Oh ***!" moment for me, and I briefly experienced that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I wondered if SharePoint was about to be made obsolete.

Ok, a little melodramatic I suppose, but Google is one of the few companies out there with the power and potential to change the status quo in a heartbeat.  From the SharePoint side of the room it has been easy and comfortable to look down our noses at Gmail and Google Apps and scoff at the notion of Google as a serious player in the enterprise space.  If that is about to change, it's huge news and spells potential disaster for the nascent SharePoint ecosystem.

On that particular day, all of us at Bamboo were fully engaged in the launch of PM Central, so I didn't have time for any in depth research on Wave.   It wasn't until yesterday that I made time to watch the recorded video of the Google Wave demo.

Is Google Wave a SharePoint Killer?

Having sat through the entire hour and twenty minute video, I am now fully equipped to definitively answer the big question on everyone's mind... is Google Wave poised to become the new collaboration platform of choice, obsoleting SharePoint?

The answer is an emphatic "No how, no way." There are some good solid innovations here that will certainly drive new features across the SharePoint / Office / .NET world.  That's the most generous statement I'll make about Wave.  I'll dedicate the balance of this post to a much more critical and realistic evaluation of the significance of Wave.

Wave Doesn't Compete with SharePoint, it Competes with Outlook

First of all, the question, "Is Google Wave a SharePoint Killer" is a completely artificial, nonsense argument dreamed up by either the Google PR team and/or the media to generate buzz.  Wave is an email client (very tempted to say "consumer email client")... an exciting and innovative one, but it's not a collaboration platform... at least if your definition of collaboration is more sophisticated than sharing pictures from a boating trip.  Wave doesn't compete with SharePoint, it competes with Outlook.

That being said, it has occurred to me recently that one of the weaknesses of SharePoint is its failure to account for the fact that email is and will continue to be the fundamental central connective tissue to all collaborative activies.  As you might imagine, Bamboo has one of the most sophisticated, tricked-out SharePoint portals in the world, and yet even here, people continue to exchange documents in email and communicate issues in email that *should* be written into a wiki or discussion board.  Why?  Convenience.  So long as it is more convenient to fire off an email than to upload a document or navigate to a message board, that is what people will do.  Wave does address this problem head on, and I think introduces a new paradigm that Outlook will have to adopt, quickly.

But an enterprise collaboration platform?  Hardly.  There is no sign of document management, content management, workflow, data integration, dashboarding etc. etc.    If Google truly believes that Wave is a platform for enterprise collaboration, it only serves as proof that they really don't understand the business.  Maybe if they fully integrated Wave, Google Sites, Google Apps, Google Gears, Google Calendar in a comprehensive platform... then you might have something.  But Microsoft has a big head start in lashing together all of these disparate capabilities and a huge installed base of customers to drive innovation based on real world feedback. 

I am not a developer, so I am not really qualified to evaluate Wave's extensibility story.  The fact that this thing is largely (not 100%) built on HTML 5 sounds like a superior approach to SharePoint 's complex Web of proprietary technologies.  It would be a good thing if Wave kept the pressure on Microsoft to embrace open standards like REST (although Bamboo has already done the heavy lifting here: Bamboo Solutions Announces REST API for SharePoint) and make it easy for anyone to develop for or integrate with SharePoint.

Predictions

1.  Google Wave will be brought to market just like Gmail.  For some months there will be a limited number of Wave invitations released to the public and your nerdiest friends will go on ad nauseum about how awesome Wave is.  Eventually Wave will completely replace Gmail as the definitive Web-based email application for consumers.

2.  My mother will never understand Wave.  Although she has just about figured out Facebook, she will never wrap her head around real-time, multi-person threaded conversations. 

3.  A flurry of domain registrations prefixed and suffixed by "wave" is probably already in progress.  Companies like "CollabWave", "ProWave" and "EnterWave" will have sites up by the end of July at the latest.

4.  A previously unplanned version of Outlook will be released in about a year that mimics and extends the Wave paradigm.  The PRD is being hastily authored right this minute by a team of Microsoft product managers who are having a very bad month.

5.  Microsoft will quietly announce that Internet Explorer will finally pledge support for HTML 5 standards.

5.  Google will never be a major factor in the enterprise collaboration space. 

Finally, I have to indulge in just a few snarky observations about the Wave demo.

1.  The new Google Wave t-shirt worn by Lars, Jens and team includes a blue swoosh under the big W that when worn by a nervous nerd on stage looks like man boob sweat.  Ew!

2.  Using Orkut to show off the capabilities of Wave to integrate with social networks is a joke.  Yeah, I know Orkut claims big numbers in South America and the African sub-continent, but among industrialized nations doesn't Orkut rank behind Bebo in terms of mindshare and significance?

3.  How bitter does Jens look that Lars and some random product manager are taking credit for all his work?

4.  The "spontaneous applause and standing ovation" referenced by Information Week were a bit oversold.  I've heard more noise from the set of the Maury Povich Show.