I’ve spent a few weeks now playing with Google Wave, and like most people who first encounter the service I started out deeply confused (see below for my exploratory exchange with Forrester RA extraordinaire Zack Reiss-Davis). As I got further into the tool I began to get a much better feel for the value it brings to the table. For a comprehensive write up see Daniel Tenner.

So what is the biggest frustration with Wave? It’s not integrated with my email. I now have two inboxes — three if you count Google Reader. Thanks Google. I have no idea when new Wave messages come in. Now admittedly this is a pretty minor quibble, but what I quickly came to realize, however, is that this problem of integration is a MUCH bigger problem than just two inboxes. What it means is that Wave will never take off as an email a stand-alone collaboration client.

Lets start with the assumption that Wave is the next paradigm in corporate email, IM, and collaboration. How will the tool be adopted? Presumably corporate IT will either proactively decide it has value or (more likely) cave to pressure from a subset of the business and start offering Wave or a Wave-like tool for employees. So what happens when the team that desperately wants Wave needs to collaborate with a coworker that doesn’t have Wave? That other employee is either SOL or he has to get his butt on Wave. That’s right, there is no clear way to use Wave in a mixed-modal environment — either EVERYONE is on or it’s simply not going to work. Having closely followed the enterprise software space for quite a while now I can assure you that no matter how much people dislike email you’ll have to pry Outlook out of their cold dead hands. To make matters worse its not like one single company can easily make the cutover either; if you abandon a traditional email client in favor of Wave you’ll constantly interact with customers, partners, and vendors who can’t make use of the Wave construct. Not too bad if you can mix traditional email and Waves into one inbox (which is undoubtedly coming) but how on earth do you invite someone into an in-progress Wave if they only have a traditional email client? (To see exactly why this is a problem take a look at Daniel Tenner’s writeup).

I have faith in Google’s ability to engineer themselves out of major computing problems, but I have yet to see them truly commit to a user experience and see it through to the end. Maybe Wave will be different, but I’m not holding my breath.

That all said, I do believe that Wave can be extremely valuable, but not as an email or IM client. Instead Wave should be applied to a collaboration environment like SharePoint or Jive. In this scenario we would abandon the Wave inbox almost completely and instead focus on creating and embedding individual Waves in workspaces and projects. Anyone with adequate permissions would be able to navigate to the Wave, comment, add value, hit replay, and quickly collaborate with colleagues. Here Wave is simply another content type. However even more likely is a scenario much like what SAP has already shown with its own Wave integration. Here Wave is simply the user experience on top of another artifact — in this case a business process modeling tool.

The Wave interaction model is very cool, and definitely groundbreaking. Advances like an appstore and federation will surely help push it along. But it will not kill your corporate email or IM; lets see what we can do with it elsewhere . . .

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