Innovations in computing used to trickle down from business and government to consumers. Mainframes evolved into personal computers. The space program put men on the moon and gave us Tang for breakfast. Now, innovation often goes the other way. Things start with consumers and are later adopted by corporations. Take blogs, for example.
Ten years ago, the term blogosphere was invented — as a joke. Blogs were geeky lists of pointers and commentary. We bloggers knew one another. Then the public embraced blogs. There are more than 100 million blogs. Twitter hosts more than 10 million microblogs and is growing at 1200+% a year. Now that blogs have “crossed the chasm” to wide-spread consumer acceptance, corporations are using blogs to capture expert knowledge and the lessons of experience.
Google Wave is the johnny-come-lately. Most people, me included, have a hard time getting their minds around it. Howard Greenstein helps explain Wave in this post from Mashable.
Wave threads together email, instant messages, documents, and applications in a way that you can follow, and even trace the history, of their links. You might follow an online conversation back in time. Or you could collaborate simultaneously. Or you could track down branches from a session by topic. Wave is a platform that both facilitates collaboration and documents it.
Just as the Google Search Appliance enables companies to find needles in haystacks behind their firewalls, Wave is likely to replace lots of wikis and content management systems. Who needs to be confined by the likes of SharePoint when you can easily see how everything is related? There’s bound to be LMS functionality in there somewhere, too.
Wave is not yet ready for prime time. The user interface is confusing. It requires more widgets and mashups to become useful. People are working on this and I expect their efforts to bear fruit in the coming year.
Overall, I feel that general-purpose software platforms are going to crowd out proprietary applications. Why not? As Moore’s Law fuels ever-faster computing and communication, the one-size-fits-all inefficiencies of a universal tool like a Swiss Army Knife become trivial.
Don’t buy that new LMS quite yet.
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