Techcrunch has a post talking about the possible demise of Google Wave, its much hyped real time collaboration platform. Even though it is not completely unexpected, it is a bit of a shocker for me personally.Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.
As Mike Arrington points out Google Wave is definitely a platform too ahead of its time. While many in the West Coast use cutting edge platforms for collaboration, the real world is slowly waking up to the advantages of Wikis and other collaborative platforms. The concept behind Wave is pretty interesting and has the potential to change the way we work across teams and organizations. It has the potential to increase the team efficiency many-fold, leading to increased productivity.
In fact, I have personally benefitted from Google Wave. I am part of some businesses ventures in other parts of the world and Google Wave is helping me collaborate seamlessly with my team members. In fact, I was very excited when Google integrated Google Wave into Google Apps and two of the companies in India are using Google Wave to not only collaborate among the team members but also with partners and customers. If you ask folks like Chris Brogan, they will vouch for the effectiveness of Google Wave as an asset for any individual or organization. Personally, I am saddened by the news and I hope Google doesn’t shut it down completely. This is my second favorite Google app to face this fate. Previously, Google shut down Google Notebook, one of my favorite tool before I embraced Evernote.
The positive side to this news is the fact that Google has released the core code as Open Source. I hope someone will take the core code and build a viable platform on top of it. After all, Open Source is a good SaaS endgame.
Here is Google’s official announcement. Bye bye Google Wave.
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