eWeek on Google Wave, What a Lark

David retweeted about this online slidedeck from Novell.

10 Persistent Messaging Problems that Google Wave Solves by Clint Boulton

You can see it here.

I appreciate that Novell is working on their Wave Server/services and it's an intriguing idea, but what does that say about Groupwise's future?

But I want to focus on some points in the slides, which were simplistic and in one case just blatant FUD.

Slide 1(Screen2) says Wave is free and open source. Great, just how long will Google support your file storage junkies for free? Last I checked there was no impediment to using Lotus products with other open source pieces. True the core Notes & Domino is IBM owned and not "free" but then it is more open to integration than Outlook and Exchange. You can even use Wave from your Notes client, or so I have been told, probably a sidebar app.

Slide 4 (screen5)Wave gives the same view to everyone, which to me is difficult to figure out the last development. But maybe I am just linear. I prefer a standardized way to see my information so every time I go there I don't need to relearn how to find information.

Slide 6 (screen7) FUD alert. 10MB limits exist because it's a default standard, which most admins never change and most companies never know they could change. Google has no such limits, per se. Just wait and see, corporates will limit it, when they start paying for the usage. Oh and tell your admins to raise the attachment limit or better yet use a Lotus Quickr server running DAOS on Domino to reduce the disk space used.

Slide 7 (screen8) a reminder that Outlook doesn't reply with attachments which drives people crazy, and why Notes clients have the options to send email with or without attachments. Wave will keep the attachments in place. Right, like Quickr does or Wiki's to a lesser extent.

They also discuss clean threading and error correcting data. So no one else has any live documents? IBM and Microsoft would argue differently. Yes past items might be stuck in a thread, but if you are using a modern platform, aside from your email to work in a collaborative manner, editing is not only available but open/secured as well to a much greater degree.

I liked Wave when I saw it but now that I have had time to play with it, I am not happy with how it works, for me, for business. Business needs a logic, sometimes bad logic, but needs logic for others to be able to work, repeat, reuse and provide training. If one has to jump around everywhere in a thread to find what could be easily defined or found using existing tools, this has a way to go to be ready for the business world.