Today I read an article with the title "
Can Google succeed outside of search?"
One piece of information got my attention a little bit more:
But Google keeps pushing: Its still-in-beta Google Wave promises to attack one of Microsoft's most beloved products, its SharePoint collaboration software.
To my knowlegde and experience with Google Wave, Wave is an online community platform and not so much a collaboration platform. Yes people can talk to each other, send messages, maybe even share a document through some link, but that is to simple to be compared with sharepoint.
The review of
Google Wave vs. Microsoft Sharepoint on the Bamboo team blog makes the difference even clearer:
First of all, the question, "Is Google Wave a SharePoint Killer" is a completely artificial, nonsense argument dreamed up by either the Google PR team and/or the media to generate buzz. Wave is an email client (very tempted to say "consumer email client")... an exciting and innovative one, but it's not a collaboration platform... at least if your definition of collaboration is more sophisticated than sharing pictures from a boating trip. Wave doesn't compete with SharePoint, it competes with Outlook.
That being said, it has occurred to me recently that one of the weaknesses of SharePoint is its failure to account for the fact that email is and will continue to be the fundamental central connective tissue to all collaborative activies. As you might imagine, Bamboo has one of the most sophisticated, tricked-out SharePoint portals in the world, and yet even here, people continue to exchange documents in email and communicate issues in email that *should* be written into a wiki or discussion board. Why? Convenience. So long as it is more convenient to fire off an email than to upload a document or navigate to a message board, that is what people will do. Wave does address this problem head on, and I think introduces a new paradigm that Outlook will have to adopt, quickly.
But an enterprise collaboration platform? Hardly. There is no sign of document management, content management, workflow, data integration, dashboarding etc. etc. If Google truly believes that Wave is a platform for enterprise collaboration, it only serves as proof that they really don't understand the business. Maybe if they fully integrated Wave, Google Sites, Google Apps, Google Gears, Google Calendar in a comprehensive platform... then you might have something. But Microsoft has a big head start in lashing together all of these disparate capabilities and a huge installed base of customers to drive innovation based on real world feedback.
I sometimes wonder if the "reporters" who send out this kind of information to the world, just lack somekind of insight or that thay deliberately say things that are just not correct. Double check your sources and trust your own knowlegde.
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