Legal Research

Say Hello ?

By scott

I am sad to see Google has called it a day on Wave, but I am not surprised. According to Google:

‘Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don?t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.’

It has not seen the user adoption for one reason in my view ? it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer natively, and most corporate IT departments will not let their staff download and install the Google Chrome Frame to make it do so. This is important, because I do think some tech people do tend to forget that for most of us in the corporate/business world, we don’t have a choice of browser to use ? or even version of that browser to use (see UK govt announcement last week that plan to carry on with IE6 on most of their machines). The larger the organization, the less likely you will be to customize IE in anyway, with IT departments/security taking control of most of your settings too.

I could have used Google Wave in my work environment, it would have been a faster way of collaborative working than a wiki and the IM aspect of it would also have been useful in some of the project teams I have worked in. But, I exist in the world described above. I could not use Wave at work, and frankly I didn’t need it at home ? although I did try it out on a number of occasions and whilst it was not the most intuitive thing going, I liked what they were trying to do, even if for the most part it seemed like a solution looking for a problem, rather than something designed to solve a problem that already existed.

So, hats off the Google for trying it, but creating something that has most use in the enterprise, and doesn’t work natively on the browser of choice of the enterprise, meant that for me it was always doomed to failure.

Full post as published by Information Overload on August 05, 2010 (boomark / email).