Jiasundar’s post on Google Wave finally turning out the lights reminded me of our own attempt to collaborate on a blog post via Google Wave. We got reasonable far with it but ran out of steam – I think partly due to some of the very shortcomings Google Wave started with.

Basic issues of connectivity – very few of our colleagues had Google Wave accounts.  We couldn’t trivially add them even if they were Gmail or Google Apps users already.

Basic issues of control – once someone was added to a Wave you couldn’t remove them.  And anyone could add someone.  That kind of permissiveness actually reduces sharing.

Minor issues of control – the Google Maps mashup was promising.  But I found you couldn’t control the location and sizing of the map presented – to show a specific region, at a specific zoom.  Pretty well defeats the purpose.

Overall the service raised the question – if a tree falls in the woods, but no one is there to hear it, does it make any noise?  If collaboration happens in the Wave, but no one is there to see it, does it still make progress?

Ultimately Google Wave failed more because of a lack of discipline and will than because of any specific technical or usability hurdle (I’m not aware of anything that couldn’t have been fixed).  It would have made for an interesting mashup with BPM, as SAP’s demonstration of Gravity showed.  But it needed to mature before it would be appropriate for an enterprise setting.

Jaisundar recaps the BPM community’s reaction to Wave – which I would characterize as initially one of panic in some corners, but I wasn’t too concerned personally, for this reason:

It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.

Intent matters.

I was recently struck by the difference between a couple of posts about SAP Gravity and Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation.

In the first, some demonstrations of SAP Gravity with Google Wave are presented. But they seem a bit contrived to me – and moreover Google Wave isn’t realistic for enterprise use yet – which makes SAP’s focus on Wave all the more puzzling (since they usually don’t focus on any technology until its pretty tried and true).  Gravity seems to be long on sizzle and short on substance to me.  But I give SAP props for trying something different to unlock innovation around their huge install base.  And honestly, what they’ve done so far has definite “cool” factor.

But then I saw this post on Windows Workflow Foundation, and I see that it is possible to have been in the BPM space for 10 years and still not get the importance of the business – it is still a programmer’s product, rather than a business-person’s product.  You can sum it all up right here:

“The purpose of WF is not to be a complete workflow solution for Windows. Instead, the goal is to make it easier for software developers to create workflow-based Windows applications.”

Luckily, if you really want to be on a Windows-centric solution, there are BPMS vendors out there that do that…