Wave vs. the Web
By Harry McCracken | Friday, August 7, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Anil Dash has a good post up about Google Wave in which he expresses concerns about its wild ambition that are in some ways a developer-focused corollary to my concerns that it may be the first Google project that suffers from Microsoftian bloat.
Anil:
And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.
Like Anil, I’ll be delighted if Wave proves that my skepticism was misplaced. Right now, though, it does feel like a mishmosh of multiple interesting ideas, implemented on an epic scale. And most new things that have caught on on the Web (including Web sites themselves) started out simple, even if they eventually grew powerful and complex….
3 Comments
Read more:
3 Comments For This Post
August 8th, 2009 at 8:24 am
The Apple Computer Story
I became nostalgic as I read the story about Apple Computer and remembered reviewwing the first Apple computer at the National Institute of Health as it was being tested for radiation safety before it could go to market. My friend and associate who ran the Testing Lab said “This is the Future of Computing!!!!” It was a little thing not much bigger than a shoebox. At that time, before computers could be sold to the public they had to tested for safe radiation levels.
Arthur L. Fuller
Former: Founding Member of the National Computer Graphics Association
Former: Chairman: Committee to Development Computer Graphic Standards for the American National Standards Institute.
Elected: Computer Graphics Pioneer
August 8th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Anil Dash is a Microsoft propagandist.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Harry, thanks for the link and the thoughtful quick take on the piece.
Zato, you’ve commented on a couple of different websites, following around mentions of my post to accuse me of being a Microsoft propagandist. In addition to be incorrect, it’s bizarre because this topic has *nothing to do* with Microsoft. I’m easy to get hold of — feel free to drop me a line at anil@dashes.com if you’ve got some point you’d like to discuss with me.