Waves of Cool

You see a fair bit of discussion around Google Wave, some people thinking it'll be Google's first big failure and others very postive about it. Now I think it could be Google's first really big high profile failure for the simple reason although it has lots of potential, it has no real obvious killer application at present. And it's hard to see the value of it immediately.

Actually looking at Google Wave, this is one of the first times that Google have actually tried to invent something and get a new concept across; well, certainly one which is new to a lot of people (I worked on similar products for a small start-up many moons ago). Google are very good at taking existing ideas and making them better, these ideas though are nearly always pretty much fully accepted already tho'. Google do not invent, they improve.

There were search engines before Google; Google just did it better.

There was online advertising before Google, Google just does it better and knows how to monetise it better.

There was webmail before Gmail, Google just does it very well.

There's nothing wrong with this approach, arguably some countries have pretty much made this their whole industry. But to truly innovate, now that's hard and all the PhD's in the world are not necessarily going to generate the creative spark needed. 

This is equally true across the whole of the technical landscape and it might not matter whether you invented a concept, you just have to do it better. So whether EMC is more innovative than NetApp or whether IBM have more patents than HDS; it does not really matter from a customer's point of view. I just want products which do want I want them to do at a price which I want to pay. 

I see lots of cool products from lots of cool companies but cool is not a feature that I am willing to pay for in professional life (personally, I'll buy cool stuff all the time but I'm not going to bet my career on cool).

p.s Happy Turkey Day to my colonial readers! Remember to buy lots of cool stuff on Black Friday!

p.p.s I do have some spare invites for Google Wave if you want to give it a go.