The Death of Google Wave is interesting.  We’ve written about Wave before, several times, but in particular when SAP put out its “Gravity” demonstration.

The official Google Blog blames the closure of Wave on a lack of user adoption:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

So, there’s a bunch of open source code, it looks like, that partners and customers might leverage.  But most of us, I think, would prefer to just use a finished product.  There are many other unofficial takes, here and here are two examples.  I had a few others linked, but no need – you can find such commentary easily!

When Wave was announced last year, I spent some time discussing with others what it meant for BPM.  Some thought it was a game-changer, some thought it was a non-event.  The thing that became clear to me: collaboration tools like this are going to tend toward being free, or extremely inexpensive.

Starting last fall, the discussion in BPM circles had often turned to “ACM” (A variant on Case Management).  Some in BPM circles would call this unstructured process. Some would call it “chaotic” or unpredictable processes/work.  Keith Swenson and colleagues even penned a book about managing such unpredictable work.  Google Wave was, to this crowd, a great example of where “knowledge work” is headed – into collaboration spaces, not into BPM software.  To me, it was just proof that email and lightweight project management tools were not going away.   If Google Wave accomplished anything, it showed:

1. Separating yourself from email divorces you from a knowledge worker’s daily routine (some might say, process).
2. If it isn’t trivial to involve the right people in a collaboration, then users give up
3. Collaboration is going to be free or nearly free.  Even if it has pretty amazing features.
4. It is really hard to do a “big bang launch” successfully.  It makes me even more impressed that Apple seems to pull this off with such regularity.

So what does it mean for BPM?  Not much.  Wave was never really about structured interaction, it was about ad-hoc interaction.  Although ad-hoc interaction is important to a good BPM strategy, no one (maybe except for SAP) was really leveraging Wave for this.  If they were, they can probably leverage the open source bits to get a jump on the development effort.  For the ACM crowd, its both good news and bad news.

First, the good news:

1. A free competitor to your products, supported by a major software company, has gone away.
2. Hm. I think that’s it.

The bad news:

1. If you were counting on convincing users to leave email to use your product for knowledge work, it is time to change gears.
2. If you were expecting that being good and free was good enough… Maybe it isn’t.  Although Wave was panned in the press, it really was pretty good at what it did, though perhaps it tried to do too much.
3. If you were expecting to charge a lot of money for general-purpose collaboration software… I think those days are over.
4. If Wave was your favorite example of how ACM was really relevant to what people are doing… time to find a new example.

Silver lining:

1. Collaboration software for very specific purposes will live on (aka process modeling, or services like tripIt).
2. Some of Wave’s features will likely get absorbed by Gmail.
3. Some of Wave’s features will likely show up in other products.

I think Keith Swenson summed it up best for the ACM folks on Twitter:

“nooooo. It can’t beeeee. :-( RT @jpmorgenthal: Google waves goodbye to Wave: http://bit.ly/bg3ixC”

Well, fans of Wave and its approach were bound to be disappointed.  I saw quite a few more comments on twitter with a more positive spin on Wave being shut down.  Google found Wave squeezed inbetween email and all the other things we do in life.  It apparently couldn’t live on its own.  I’m not sure the future of ACM, per se, is anything different.  Yes, the ACM proponents will have their analogies, and they sound compelling.  And we could even agree that a large percentage of work is not addressed by BPM today, or by, more specifically, structured process.  But what ACM proponents fail to mention is that even less work is currently addressed by purpose-built ACM software.  It *could* be, but isn’t.  It is still likely to be addressed by email, project management tools, telephone, hallway conversation, and more email.

Note, I’m not arguing against ACM as a description of work, I’m just looking at the software market and not seeing it as an independent market, yet.  Willing to be proven wrong.  And I think there are a couple vendors that have the right strategy or tactics, but we’ll see if they can execute.

Working on a longer collaborative post on ACM and the marketplace.  Watch this space.

Really interesting take on the Apple-Google conflict on Daring Fireball (John Gruber’s blog), as well as in the New York Times. It at least seems that the competition and animosity between these two companies runs deeper than perhaps anyone on the outside realized.

It’s really too bad because most of what these two companies do is so complementary, and symbiotic.  One wonders if Google is fighting too many battles on too many fronts- the same kind of question that was often posed to Microsoft when they were competing with so many software companies for so many of its applications.  The interesting thing to me is, I’m not sure that this fight was necessary for Google.  “Smart” phones were inevitably going to give Google the opening in the mobile space that it was looking for… The only real concern I can see is whether these platforms would, in some fashion, be closed to Google’s applications and ad platforms.  It doesn’t seem likely, given how compelling Google’s map and search applications are, and the ubiquity of Google Apps as a platform. And given that smart phones are already cheap ($99 or less), price doesn’t seem to be a huge barrier to entry anymore…

I hope that in spite of the competition in some areas, that these two firms can work together in areas where it makes sense-  I love the map application on my iPhone, but I’m not switching to Android in the foreseeable future – I like the overall Apple iPhone experience.

I’m a big fan of Google.  And of the products that Google produces that I use (Gmail, Google Apps, Gtalk, Google search itself).  But lately some of the products from Google are reminding me more and more of Microsoft, which has me concerned:

1. Me-too product releases
2. VERY corporate-appropriate names for the products being released
3. Failure to embrace the world outside the ‘plex

Maybe I should explain what I mean in more detail…

Me-Too Product Releases

You might say everything Google has ever done is “me-too” – its not as if Search didn’t exist before Google came along.  Or email.  Or even web email.  Or instant messaging.  Or document editing in a web browser… the list goes on and on.

But the difference in (most of) these cases is that the field had become a bit moribund and was lacking innovation – leaving itself open to a new entrant.  Search seemed like a dead-end.  Web email was stagnant and sites like Yahoo! mail and Hotmail left a lot to be desired.  If there wasn’t a technological edge that Google could gain, then Google was able to exploit an economic edge (more storage for the “free” price, or free document editing on Google Apps instead of paying for MS Word).

But the space of real-time broadcasting and status updates and social graphs is hardly a field of stagnation.  Facebook and Twitter are robust companies at the top of their game for their respective niches.  Foursquare is up-and-coming (and several other firms like it). The problem here is that Google can’t out-innovate these companies in their core competency.  The fast-follow works better if you wait for the arteriosclerosis to set in with these firms – either due to the weight of technical debt they’ve taken on (client side apps, instant messaging), or due to the organizational heft and indecision (Yahoo?) or due to painting themselves into a corner with respect to revenue models (e.g. Microsoft).  The new firms have none of these problems.  They’re nimble, decisive, and have emerging revenue models with little to lose and much to disrupt. VERY corporate-appropriate names for the products being released

Corporate-Appropriate Names

Remember when Microsoft had a lock on this approach to naming applications? Now Google is doing it.  Latitude, Gmail, Gtalk, Buzz, Docs, Apps, etc.  And when they do come up with a “funky” name, it really doesn’t resonate (Orkut?).  Meanwhile, companies with lighthearted names are eating their lunch – Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla.

It just makes me wonder if the suits have taken over important naming-functions at the firm.  Sometimes the name of something affects how people perceive it – even internally.  And unfortunately, even when Google tries to be more whimsical these days, it comes off like they’re trying too hard.

Remember when Google was coming up with whimsical names like… “Google” ?

Failure to Embrace the World Outside the ‘Plex

Search gives Google an advantage in “embracing” the outside world in most of their applications – most noticeably in Google Maps (now there’s a product name with all the creativity of paint drying).  I’m not sure why Google didn’t just buy Twitter and get it over with. But, if Google’s not going to buy Twitter, another straightforward thing to do is embrace it by integrating Twitter functionality into Gmail – not copying Twitter, but leveraging Twitter’s API.  Show how integrating Twitter functionality into your email client could make both more useful.  Show how integrating search into the experience can also make them more powerful.

And then figure out how to slip Google’s own “real-time-update” infrastructure into the mix – perhaps by granting twitter users their identical @names on Google’s infrastructure – essentially adopting the useful conventions of the leading platform.  Don’t make people rebuild their social graph, let them port it over while retaining a separate identity from their email address (one of the beauties of Twitter, for example, is that it is (somewhat) resistant to spam because you only see messages from people you follow).

Well, Google has a lot of smart people – I’m sure they’ll figure out the strategy, but I was disappointed that they didn’t just improve my life by making it easier for me to Tweet (Twitter?) and Facebook.  I’m not the only one who thinks they might have missed the target.  The Business Insider describes Buzz as “Late, Boring, and Lame“.  And Twitter was not full of supportive comments today, e.g.:

cdixon : Prediction: Google’s Twitter killer will be lame. A few billion dollars later they buy Twitter.

cdixon : Besides being just generally bad at social, Google products seem to be suffering from a strategy tax a la MSFT.

I think Google should drop the product launches.  Apple is really good at them, and each product launch creates almost as much negative buzz in the aftermath as positive buzz (where’s my videocamera on the iPad!? who named it “iPad”? ).  If you do a mediocre or “okay” job with the product launches, its even worse.  I suggest they go back to releasing product the Googley way:  by putting it out there and letting people discover it.

It looks like Nexus One may not be the iPhone killer after all (despite all the Google ads running on TechCrunch these days)…

The first quote:

Flurry is estimating the Nexus One only sold 20,000 handsets in its first week. That means the Droid, with an estimated 250,000 units sold in its opening week, outsold the Nexus One by more than 12 times. The myTouch 3G, with 60,000 units outsold it by 3 times.

Ouch. And people were non-plussed with Droid and myTouch numbers… But it gets worse.

The iPhone 3GS sold 1.6 million units in its opening week, according to Flurry, which means it outsold the Nexus One by a “staggering” 80 times.

So, even if these estimates are off by 2x or even 10x, these aren’t stellar out-of-the-blocks numbers… I think it was too much to expect their first couple of efforts to out-do the iPhone. Story embedded below, courtesy of Business Insider.

I’ve been reading the latest flurry of iPhone / NexusOne articles and blog posts making the rounds, and I just can’t resist commenting.  Walt Mossberg gives both products a thumbs up, and Michael Arrington says the Nexus One is better than the iPhone (um. okay).  But, once again, all too many analysts and pundits are trying to compare what’s happening now to what happened with the Mac and the PC back in the 80′s/90′s… essentially comparing Apple to, well, Apple.  And comparing Google to Microsoft.  There are some valid similarities.

But they’re missing a few key things that make this round different.  In particular, those who want Google to come out on top cite Bill Gurley’s article on the subject. Gurley, first of all, paints Apple as dependent on receiving a share of the subscription revenue of the Telecom partners – but this was, to my knowledge, only true of the exclusive partners – e.g. AT&T.  Second, I believe when Apple renewed its contract with AT&T and revised the pricing to the consumer downward dramatically, that it gave up that subscription revenue in exchange for a lower consumer price.

Gurley goes on to make much of the difference in price point.  But, as Arrington states:

The Nexus One is available “in large quantities” starting today at Google.com/phone. An unlocked GSM version of the phone that will work in most countries is $529.

Google is also offering a subsidized version of the phone – also unlocked – through T-Mobile for $179. The service plan offered by Google is 500 minutes/unlimited SMS/unlimited data for $80/month. T-Mobile’s termination fee is $200, and some users might be tempted to buy the T-Mobile version and terminate immediately, paying just $379 for the unlocked phone. Google says that users terminating too soon will be charged the full price of the phone, however. But even the T-Mobile version of the phone can be used overseas on trips by slipping in a different SIM.

So… how was that cheaper than an iPhone exactly?  Oh. It wasn’t.  You can pick up a 3G iPhone for $99, with 8Gb of memory, rather than the anemic 190MB or so of app memory standard for the Nexus One.  After all, the whole point of these things is to run Apps right?

Gurley pushes the point that cheaper to carriers will matter!  But doesn’t explain how, exactly, that ends up being the case (except, possibly, with respect to Verizon):

The Android strategy results in phones at much lower prices with much more diversity which will hit a broader set of demographics. Apple can and will quintuple its current market share and still have a small portion of the overall cell phone market.

But unless the carriers start paying me to take phones, I’m not sure that the prices don’t get appreciably close to zero and therefore not matter to me or anyone else.  The real cost will end up being in the telecom services.

Mr. Gurley is also overlooking a more obvious analogy to the phone market: the mp3 player market.  And the reason to look at it?  Volume.  Apple is the biggest or one of the biggest buyers of the memory that goes into these devices, in the form factors required.  Apple’s sheer volume of orders allows it to pull off a rare double-whammy against the competition:

1. Buy vast quantities of memory at guaranteed prices, often much lower than competitors can get, and with supply guaranteed or prioritized over other buyers.
2. Actually drive UP the cost of these same components for competitors by buying so much capacity that the spot market is left with too little supply – causing painful price spikes for other buyers (Apple’s competitors).

The memory purchasing advantage is significant.  And Apple gets to consolidate its purchasing power across iPod, iPod Touch, and all three iPhone versions.  Certain economies of scale are not about software cost, and this time around Apple is the one with the economies of scale in hardware – and this advantage is one that even phone manufacturers with much larger marketshare (e.g. Nokia) don’t share – because they don’t buy such massive quantities of flash memory.

Also, like the mp3 market before iPod, the mobile phone business is a big, existing business with high unit volumes.  Many industry analysts assume that Apple cannot win a majority of share in a market because someone (Microsoft or Google) will offer an OS that will take away the mass market by being cheaper.  But what Apple understands is that below a certain price, cheaper just means “less good”, not “better”.  Apple’s profit share of the PC business far outstrips its unit share.  Its profit share of the mobile business even more dramatically outstrips its unit share.

While I think part of Gurley’s analysis is dead on:

Users won’t switch in mass from the iPhone to the Android. It’s the other 3.95 billion cell phone users that are highly likely to consider Android a step up from their current feature phone.

However, his assumption that android customers will be price sensitive and Apple customers price insensitive, seems off-base to me.  Can Apple drop the price from $99 to $10?  Sure it can. Because that is just the subsidized price from the wireless provider.  If Apple asks for less money from the carrier, that can be passed on in the form of a lower up front payment. Gurley states: “Some will argue that the best product will win the market and that Apple will still dominate the smartphone market. The history of the personal computer market is no omen for this thesis. “  Well true enough, but then again the mp3 market is an omen in support of this thesis.  I’m not sure why the mp3 market isn’t relevant to Gurley’s analysis.

Time will tell – and if Google’s Android produces better phones (and ecosystem) than Apple’s iPhone and Appstore ecosystem, then everyone will clearly be better off for it – and if they don’t achieve this high bar, they’ll still have raised the bar for anyone who doesn’t want to buy an iPhone but still wants a smart phone (as Mossberg states, the Blackberry UI is looking more and more antiquated by the day).  I just think the pundits and analysts are underestimating the benefits of scale that Apple currently has – much larger benefits than you would think with only “one phone” on the market…

After writing this, I found a few other posts that are more aligned with my way of thinking.  One, by none other than Henry Blodget which makes the point (quite rightly) that actually Google is not now in the phone business.  This is the HTC Nexus One, on the T-mobile network.  Google actually just set up a storefront.  And wrote Android.  And probably provided technical advice (much as it did for Droid). Its a pretty compelling argument.  However, the new Android-based phones *are* increased competition for the smartphone category (including the iPhone).  I just think it really puts more pressure on the Blackberries and feature-phones than it does on the iPhone.  I also think everyone is underestimating the lock-in value of having an iPhone – if I switch phones I have to buy new apps… different apps maybe… and maybe I’m happy with the App ecosystem I’ve got!

And then Dan Frommer argues that the customers service for the Google Phone won’t be what we’re used to if you buy from their online store, because you’ll have HTC, Tmobile, and Google to deal with, depending on your issue.  Google doesn’t own the customer relationship… Nothing insurmountable, but it may lead to bad press down the road as people run into inevitable service problems.  These problems happen in the Apple/iPhone world too -but Apple is in a better position to fix them and protect the brand.

Finally, Pogue of the NYT hits on a few sour notes, starting with the smaller selection of apps (about 1/10 of what is available on the iPhone – this is such a strange mirror image of the old Windows vs. Mac debate… ):

Worse, even if you find a lot of good ones, you might not have anywhere to install them… the Nexus allots only [190 megabytes of storage space] for downloaded apps.

The Nexus also does not come with any iTunes-style companion software…

There’s no physical ringer on-off switch…

Sadly, the Nexus One also lacks a multi-touch screen like the iPhone’s….

Finally, the Nexus just doesn’t attain the iPhone’s fit and finish.

Note the storage space (my emphasis) – my nearly 2 year old iPhone 3G has 8Gb of storage space for apps… about 40x as much… Of course, as the Insider points out, his take on the business model is even more scathing. Read the Insider article or the NY Times original for more…

Of course, for the “drank the Google Phone” kool-aide crowd there is this piece by Brian Sheehan arguing that Google will own mobile.  It isn’t a bad piece of writing – I just don’t agree that Google and Apple will forgo giving the iPhone most of the same integration advantages.  I do think that Google is enough of a “swing for the fences” company to do audacious things like buying fiber optic cable (oh wait, they’ve already done that)… So maybe they really will get into telecom.  We’ll see.

On the other end of the spectrum, Stewart Alsop crushes the Droid in his review.  It isn’t Nexus One but one could assume that Nexus One would have to be a big software improvement to make Stewart happy…

Apple’s net profit from iPhone’s exceeded Nokia’s by approximately 50% ($1.6B in net for Apple, $1.1B in net for Nokia). Its the first time Apple’s net profit in phones exceeded Nokia’s, and it is a dramatic reversal. Just 7.4 million phones generated this profit for Apple. Nokia sold 108 million phones to generate its $1.1B.

The way things are headed, Nokia and others may have more volume, but Apple and RIM will have substantially all the profit.  This is similar to what’s happening in the PC world, where Apple has a stunning 90% share of computers that cost over $1000, according to NPD reports.  Meanwhile the profit is getting sucked out of the rest of the PC business by netbooks and lower cost laptops.

Meanwhile, the AppleInsider has a really interesting comparison of the business models of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phone.  It points out that while Google’s model has some advantages, there are also some disadvantages – no control over the Android brand, for one, and lack of clear accountability to fix customer issues once they have an Android phone.  AppleInsider points out that one bad Android phone can tarnish the brand – which is true of the iPhone as well, but the difference is that Apple has control over what gets released with the iPhone brand, but Google can’t exercise the same kind of control over Android derivatives.  I can’t help but think that the fragmented market of Android phones will only be an advantage if collectively the phones can evolve faster and take advantage of new technology faster than Apple’s iPhones… but so far technology adoption hasn’t been the problem – user experience has been the problem.  And it seems like Apple still has the edge there.

So, when twitter turned up mentions of a new language from Google called Go, I was sure it was a prank.  I even looked at the calendar to see if it was some kind of day worthy of pranking the Internet at large.  After I saw a few more tweets and retweets about Go, I even clicked the link to see what it took me to (honestly, try searching for “Go” sometime… you would think the people at Google would understand that a common two letter word may not be a great search term…).

So I read the FAQ on the “Go” site here.  Despite my better judgment I do like some of the conventions and minimalism they’ve adopted, such as having postfix, but not prefix notation for incrementing.  And there were a few statements that *really* hit home for me, like this one:

Another point is that a large part of the difficulty of concurrent and multi-threaded programming is memory management; as objects get passed among threads it becomes cumbersome to guarantee they become freed safely. Automatic garbage collection makes concurrent code far easier to write. Of course, implementing garbage collection in a concurrent environment is itself a challenge, but meeting it once rather than in every program helps everyone.

Finally, concurrency aside, garbage collection makes interfaces simpler because they don’t need to specify how memory is managed across them.

They’ve articulated a key principle of their approach - that they are solving something that is a hard problem, not because it is hard, but because it is hard and useful to the end users (other programmers).  They are faced with a choice of solving that problem once in the language (implementing good, efficient garbage collection), or implementing it myriad times in the programs written with this language (a la C and C++).  Hard problems that have a lot of re-use and benefit are worth solving.

If we look at a good BPMS, it serves some of the same function – handling parallelism, memory management, and other key software architecture concerns for the business process author – in order to allow the author to focus more clearly on solving the business problem. BPMS offerings largely have a lot of room to improve on all these fronts – but they’re still the best thing we have for a “language” that fits the “problem” (despite rules vendors’ claims to the contrary).

I’m often faced with a problem that lends itself to being solved once, well – or many times, poorly.  And often the software engineers of our world tell me “yes, but that’s hard, and not on the road map.”  A great example of this is date calculations that transparently do things like comparing, navigating timezones, calculating differences, navigating business days (and calendars), etc.  A better example is robust versioning for complex assets like business process models which include all the implementation details.

Other “features” that caught my eye in Go:

• No generic types.  No exceptions.  They admit they don’t have a good solution yet, so they don’t slap a band-aid on it.  Try not to write code that breaks.
• No type inheritance.  A type is more like an “interface” – where any object that implements the methods the type requires are, by definition, “of that type”.  This reminds me a bit of protocols in objective-C, but without the necessity of pre-defining the relationships (technically, you can define and compile-and-link later in objective-C but that’s another story).
• No overloading.  Never in the history of software engineering has a more useless and anti-performant feature been introduced at a language level.  Nice to see another language that forgoes operator overloading.

Of course, this minimalism will be tested with time – especially if the audience of Go users expands – or if the language is handed over to a standards body full of people who really have it as an interest to keep tweaking the language (a la Java and C++) – over time making it increasingly complicated.

In the meantime, I’m just happy to be pleasantly surprised that this supposed prank has some decent substance.  Did Google really need to design a new language to handle concurrency and other large-scale problems well?  I can’t say for sure, but at least once going down that road they’ve made some promising early design decisions: focusing on the key, differentiated problems their solving, and postponing or not solving areas that are not directly related.