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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As you may have noticed already I am an unabashed Google skeptic — at least when it comes to Google in the enterprise. They have yet to show me they are truly committed to the enterprise space, and the customers they have shown thus far have frankly been a bit disappointing; they are mostly small, techie, and or higher education. The pace of product innovation has been slow — how long has it been now since I lost my bet with Rob Koplowitz about GoogleGears? — and the numbers Google provides for the size of the business are dramatically skewed by the Postini acquisition.

Today Google announced a webinar with Genentech. The $12bn pharmaceutical will discuss its 12,000 employee implementation of Google Calendar. As best I can tell that represents the entire employee base for the company. Impressive. We’ll have to keep a close eye on how deep the Google apps suite works its way into the company — I’d like to hear that Google is running Genentech’s email, a truly mission critical app, but calendar is big step in the right direction. A few more customer examples like this and a lot of CIOs will look at Google with fresh eyes.

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This one should be filed in the “well its about time” category. According to The Australian, Google is going to start assessing customer needs and trying to fill them, instead of building products in search of a market, as Google famously has done with just about everything else. According to Google’s newly created Strategic Planning Director Stuart Smith, “‘What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience,’ Smith says. ‘What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say “perhaps there is a need over here — let’s meet that need”.’”

While I applaud the effort — and as a market researcher who has tried to work with Google in the past there is no shortage of “I told you so” in this — I’m skeptical that the Google culture will truly change. Clearly the path to success is to come up with projects that turn into products, and I would be surprised if well researched, corporate-lead initiatives had the same cache within the company. On top of that it is pretty clear the memo has not been delivered to all parts of the organization, as Google Enterprise has just launched its own lab.

Google will need to tread carefully: on the one hand becoming more programmatic and customer-centric — for a notoriously engineering driven company — is a huge improvement, but if they swing the pendulum too far there is the potential to lose the ingenuity and innovation driving the company, not to mention make it a miserable place to work. I would guess the pendulum doesn’t swing hardly at all, but even a little movement should be a major positive for consumers and (presumably) enterprise customers.

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