It's 5 AM on a morning that may easily turn out to be the last hot humid day of of a hot humid summer on Cape Cod Bay. The sun is just beginning to peak over the Truro/Wellfleet cliffs. The tide has turned and is heading in across the Quivet and Sesuit flats and lifting charter and personal fishing boats at their moorings in the harbor as they are just about to head out the channel looking for some stripers.
What the hell does that have to do with information technololgy?
Nothing but when I first worked for Datapro, McGraw-Hill paid by the word leading to decades of bad writing habits. The first paragraph is just a precursor to the news that Google dropped its Wave on August 4.
As I feared in June 2009, and I really wish I had been wrong, another very capable technology- and market-astute company has faced the collaboration conundrum and blinked. It was so obvious in hindsight: back in 1980 no one in the beta test would use Data Genera CEO (I can't remember its code name) Calendar despite the breakthrough features built into it by Jit Saxena and his crew, including then unheard-of intergration with word processing and email. Who wants the boss to be able to easily figure out where you are? Instantly rope you into a meeting you don't want to attend? Brainstorm "on the fly" "on the virtual whiteboard" on another one of his harebrained ideas? Etc.?
Google's Wave was no tidal bore and didn't even leave a ring of seaweed on the beach as it receded. (Oh, and as much as I had hoped for its success, Wave is now another great example of the technical press wetting itself over something that doesn't exist or that it doesn't understand.)
At last week's Microsoft (MSFT) Financial Analyst's Day, company executives continued to tout the way Outlook/Office was eating IBM Lotus Notes' lunch. Yet strangely, Notes creator and Microsoft research VP Ray Ozzie was not on the agenda talking about his latest collaboration vision. The area where IT and enerprise software could do the most good for business and the economy continues to be a case too tough to crack. Becasue -- believe it or not -- of human nature.
Oh, and if you did not like the first paragraph and my stretch to tie today on Cape Cod into Google Wave, I was going to do a thing on all the great white shark sightings on the outer arm of the Cape.
Maybe that would have been more appropriate for an investment research blog.
-- Dennis Byron
(no financial interest in companies mentioned except for the $12 a year I pay Microsoft for Office)
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