I had a look at the epic 1 hour and 20 minute google wave video on YouTube. I had to skip lots of "cutsie" bits but I think I got the idea. Well.. I am not really blown away by the concepts. Why ? well, it's just Lotus Collaboration suite totally webified and tweaked for consumer use, not strictly the corporate environment. Watching people applaud what is effectively "sametime" chat is not really ground breaking stuff. I can remember using the "phone" command on the ol Vax/VMS systems at university in the early 90's. But this is not meant to trivialise the effort Lars and team over the last 2 years, but rather how the audience seem to be a bit drunk on the kool-aid. But you get that at all the geek-fests in their respective technologies.

What is interesting is how Lars has managed to encapsulate what IBM has been slugging away at for the last few years (but are still not quite there yet). What is even more interesting is how the google code suite, in particular GWT, should allow developers to integrates wave into custom solutions. This is one of things I notice from Google. Some really worldy thinking that looks outward at current trends and projects them forward.

Lars attributes alot of his accomplishments to date to GWT, (which he pronounced GWiT) which has enabled the tremendous amount of integration to date. Google wave is still under development but it's well on the way. To sum up google wave, it's like a mashup-on-steroids, or moving towards an uber-collaboration platform. Mike Rhodin started this journey with IBM way back in 2005 ? Or was it Ambuj Goyal before him ? Anyway it was eons ago.

One observation I have noticed is how fast you can produce something without the handicap of legacy support. What makes so many developers, and CIO's, happy with not having to rip and replace, in fact only slows the evolution of the product when the rest of the world is evolving rapidly without this encumberance. But Google haven't really moved into this corporate territory currently dominated by IBM and Microsoft. They still move in the consumer sector with all this stuff. Another observation is that if you showed Lotus Notes 8.5 to the same audience would you get the same reaction from them ? There are alot of similarities...

Should Google decide to apply their significant capital into the corporate collaboration area, it would be a fresh injection of innovation and competition into the sector. At the end of the day, Google are rapidly evolving existing ideas to build a better solution, but are only moving in the same direction that Lotus has been for some years. So, Lotus you better get a move on!