Google Wave is a game changer

[Freak Out]

Is Google Voice a game changer? Can somebody please change my diapers? Hello?

[Partial]

Is Google Voice a game changer? Can somebody please change my diapers? Hello?

Is this a joke? Google Voice is way too late to the scene. They bought grand central years ago. I do, however, enjoy the Google Voice, as I now screen calls for my on the side business, recruiters off of job boards, etc.

[Freak Out]

Is Google Voice a game changer? Can somebody please change my diapers? Hello?

Is this a joke? Google Voice is way too late to the scene. They bought grand central years ago. I do, however, enjoy the Google Voice, as I now screen calls for my on the side business, recruiters off of job boards, etc.

Well.....the diaper part was a joke. Hey fuck off and hook a guy up with a invite for Google Voice! I tried to get it but had to be "invited".

[Partial]

Is Google Voice a game changer? Can somebody please change my diapers? Hello?

Is this a joke? Google Voice is way too late to the scene. They bought grand central years ago. I do, however, enjoy the Google Voice, as I now screen calls for my on the side business, recruiters off of job boards, etc.

Well.....the diaper part was a joke. Hey fuck off and hook a guy up with a invite for Google Voice! I tried to get it but had to be "invited".

PM me your gmail and I will. FYI, the voicemail to text translations suck. Evidently with Vonage they're right on the money. Google needs to license that technology asap as its awful currently.

NM... don't see an invite widget on page.

[Tarlam!]

Tarlam, you boob.

Dear Skin, I thought we had agreed no bedrrom talk on PR. Now you have me blushing!

[superfan]

This app is not without potential. However, calling it a game changer is a prime example of putting the cart before the horse. The app is not even released yet as a final product, and in its current incarnation does not appear to be suitable for anything but personal (not corporate) use.

Partial, you question the flexibility of large organizations to adopt technology such as this, and you question the adoption of Sharepoint at such organizations. However, this app appears to lack several features that are absolute, critical requirements for many organizations:

1. LDAP integration - This application appears to lack LDAP integration. Can you reasonably expect large organizations with 10,000+ users to separately create and manage user accounts in this application? Not to mention customer/client accounts, which appears to be a big strength of this product, the ability to collaborate with these individuals.

2. Security - Many organizations have compliance requirements for security purposes, and companies that don't have these requirements still should be very aware of security. Should sensitive corporate information be trusted to anyone at Google to view as they desire? How do you lock clients into only the data they should see, and not collaboration between corporate employees and other clients? Even if this is viewed as a team focused, internal only app that is not customer facing, it is inevitable that sensitive information of some sort will be exchanged, and therefore viewable by others outside of your company.

I am not ashamed to admit that I did not watch the entire video in its entirety, it was far too nauseating. So perhaps some of these capabilities do exist or are planned, and I missed it. I can't consider this software for my company unless these issues are addressed. I work for a relatively small, "sexy", Mac centric company, and in that sense this software is a good fit, but I still can't recommend it for corporate use.

The Google nerd sums up the product nicely in the first minute of the video - it is a "personal communication and collaboration tool", and a far cry from anything that is corporate (much less Fortune 500) ready. I have limited exposure to Sharepoint, but I know enough about it to say that despite its flaws, it is at least capable of addressing issues #1 or #2 above, which is more than I can say of Google Wave.

Imagine an informal chat on Google Wave between developers about an existing or potential customer that is, shall we say, less than discreet, and this chat somehow finds its way onto a blog. Questions will follow. How did this happen? Who had access to this chat? Can we check the log files? Does this product even have log files that track all access rights and activity? People lose their jobs over gaffes such as this.

It is one thing to suggest that this software has potential. It can be dangerous to call it a game changer, and rip on businesses that have not adopted this, or similar, products, without thinking about the full implications.

If somebody can alleviate my concerns, I welcome the input. If it met all of our requirements, I would consider it for my company, and we could use a product with these capabilities.

[superfan]

Partial, I'm going to call you out on a few items here, perhaps for your benefit as well as anyone else who happens to read this. I know you are relatively new to the IT field. I'll be the first to admit I am neither the smartest nor most skilled guy ever born, but I do have 10+ years managing a corporate IT environment, you can accept my comments or not, makes no difference to me.

Large corporations are far too slow and set on buying tools with commercial support than using an excellent, free alternative.

In my experience I have used free/open source options whenever they make sense. For example, our help desk ticketing system is open source, and we love it. Why? Because it gives us everything we need, and it is reliable. And if it does go down for a brief period of time, we can still function via phone calls, walk ups, etc.

However, the key phrase you use here is "commercial support". If a business is running a mission critical, 24x7 application, it makes far more sense to have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a vendor in place that includes (for example) a 4 hour response/resolution for any issues. Let's say my company incurs $100,000 in lost revenue for every hour of downtime/lost productivity when this application is unavailable. It is a no-brainer for me to spend $20k/year for a support contract, vs. the help desk frantically trying to fix an unsupported "free" application that could take days to fix.

Your business requirements drive the need of commercial vs. open source solutions. If you have a high tolerance for downtime, than the open source solution makes more sense.

Why do you think so many companies use IBM's extremely overpriced product when you can typically get software that does the same thing (or very close to) for free?

The reasons I listed above are also valid here - all depends on your tolerance for downtime. In this case I would also add the lack of features in the free version as a key criteria. I don't know what IBM product you are referring to (Websphere? Domino/Notes?), but it doesn't matter.

In this case the key phrase is "does the same thing or very close to" for the free product. If the president of the company comes up to you and says "Why can't I do this?" and your answer is "Because that isn't available in the free product we use", unless your company is extremely limited in regards to budget, you will find yourself moving to the paid product to support the feature set required by your president and your users. Some corporate politics generally come into play at this point.

Also, unless you're buying an assload of M$ software, you can run sharepoint. Craziness. By the time you're done with all the licensing and massive staff to administer unstable windows servers, you're spending far more than it would cost to get a far superior product in basecamp/jive SBS.

This is not necessarily accurate. My company is not large by most standards, we have between 200-300 seats, which qualifies us as an SME (Small/Medium Enterprise), yet during licensing negotiations, Sharepoint CALs were essentially free when purchased with Windows and Office, so we are facing very little additional cost if we choose to migrate to Sharepoint. I believe this will be pretty consistent with companies of our size or larger. So the Sharepoint licensing cost argument is basically moot.

Plus, the "massive staff to administer unstable windows servers" comment is ill informed and generally false. In my experience, our Apple XServes have required many more staff hours related to troubleshooting and maintenance than our Windows servers. The Apple servers have been more prone to hardware failure in our environment and are more costly when it comes to hardware replacement. We have three physical Apple servers, eight physical Windows servers, and an additional 20 or so Windows virtual servers in VMWare. The Apple servers require at least double the time and expense of the Windows servers for hardware and software related issues, with a much lower install base. I can't say whether we are consistent with industry averages in this regard or not, all I know is my own experience.

I like what I've seen of Basecamp, but can't comment on jive SBS, not familiar with that product.

Hope this helps clarify any questions Packer fan/IT geeks might be having.

[Partial]

This app is not without potential. However, calling it a game changer is a prime example of putting the cart before the horse. The app is not even released yet as a final product, and in its current incarnation does not appear to be suitable for anything but personal (not corporate) use.

Partial, you question the flexibility of large organizations to adopt technology such as this, and you question the adoption of Sharepoint at such organizations. However, this app appears to lack several features that are absolute, critical requirements for many organizations:

1. LDAP integration - This application appears to lack LDAP integration. Can you reasonably expect large organizations with 10,000+ users to separately create and manage user accounts in this application? Not to mention customer/client accounts, which appears to be a big strength of this product, the ability to collaborate with these individuals.

2. Security - Many organizations have compliance requirements for security purposes, and companies that don't have these requirements still should be very aware of security. Should sensitive corporate information be trusted to anyone at Google to view as they desire? How do you lock clients into only the data they should see, and not collaboration between corporate employees and other clients? Even if this is viewed as a team focused, internal only app that is not customer facing, it is inevitable that sensitive information of some sort will be exchanged, and therefore viewable by others outside of your company.

I am not ashamed to admit that I did not watch the entire video in its entirety, it was far too nauseating. So perhaps some of these capabilities do exist or are planned, and I missed it. I can't consider this software for my company unless these issues are addressed. I work for a relatively small, "sexy", Mac centric company, and in that sense this software is a good fit, but I still can't recommend it for corporate use.

The Google nerd sums up the product nicely in the first minute of the video - it is a "personal communication and collaboration tool", and a far cry from anything that is corporate (much less Fortune 500) ready. I have limited exposure to Sharepoint, but I know enough about it to say that despite its flaws, it is at least capable of addressing issues #1 or #2 above, which is more than I can say of Google Wave.

Imagine an informal chat on Google Wave between developers about an existing or potential customer that is, shall we say, less than discreet, and this chat somehow finds its way onto a blog. Questions will follow. How did this happen? Who had access to this chat? Can we check the log files? Does this product even have log files that track all access rights and activity? People lose their jobs over gaffes such as this.

It is one thing to suggest that this software has potential. It can be dangerous to call it a game changer, and rip on businesses that have not adopted this, or similar, products, without thinking about the full implications.

If somebody can alleviate my concerns, I welcome the input. If it met all of our requirements, I would consider it for my company, and we could use a product with these capabilities.

Those are all valid concerns and the security issue is ultimately going to be the same with any cloud platform/app engine, etc.

This thing is a great commnication tool for small business. Never would work at my large company. That's why we use Jive SBS. Great piece of software.

Also agree on the other points you made. Nobody in their right mind would dispute those. Most companies cannot afford to pay big bucks to get enterprise level support. Take IBM for example. Just to have our stuff in an IBM data center, we pay 800k a month for a small application. Then, another application that our company has which actually uses Websphere portal and app server, an army of servers, rational application developer, performance tester, whatever the rational continuous integration tools is, etc... You can cover all of your bases with open source software such as JBoss portal, eclipse, cruise control, etc and have almost the same feature set for free versus the millions of dollars in licensing and maintenance costs. The fortune 500 is about covering your ass, I get that, but they also don't drive innovation.

That's good to know about Sharepoint. I just googled it to be honest and didn't look closely because I really don't care. That software is terrible, though. If you company has the fat IBM-ish budgets, check out www.jivesoftware.com it's like IBM connections but has some really great project management stuff built in.

[mraynrand]

Where is Superfan when you need him? Wha happened to Google wave?

[Freak Out]

Google wave is still alive and well....don't think it ever made it to game changer status but it does work pretty well. Superfan is with Rastak watching a Twins game.