Google Wave, or maybe more accurately, the open source Wave protocol could be the most important innovation to our interaction with the Internet since the development of the Web.

I say all of that in spite of being a little frustrated with Wave’s current early beta state and lack of wide-spread availability. Now that the preview version has been available for a while, I’ve read articles saying that Google Wave underwhelms or even fails. There are still some problems to work out (it’s only a preview version after all) but I think it’s off-base to trash it so I’m going to do the opposite with this post.

Don’t know what it is? Here’s a simplistic overview: with Wave you can start a conversation (instantly or sequentially) with friends, colleagues, whoever, incorporating essentially any other electronic form of media you desire. The whole history is maintained in the Wave and can be played back as it occured or glimpsed as a fait accompli.

I think of a Wave as a discrete encapsulation of both content and the live processes of the people engaging with each other, engaging with that content. It can easily be distributed, shared, or otherwise punctured.

Google Wave makes it easy to embed games, business applications (SAP’s Gravity prototype is an impressive example; I don’t understand why they’re bothering with 12sprints Streamwork–they’d be better off building functionality on Wave *), text documents, video meetings, the possibilities go on and on; all of these things operate under real time collaboration. Even a plain wave let’s you see other people’s typing as it occurs. This is neat, it’s valuable, sweet utility that will draw people to Google Wave but it’s not what makes Wave so important or really differentiates it.

I think Wave has two crucial things going for it. First, it gives you control over whether waves are public or not and second, perhaps more importantly, it’s based on a free and open-source protocol.

My first point: the publicness.

Waves can be embedded in Web sites. Imagine browsing your favourite site and seeing a link for a public wave. You join it. Instantly you’re part of a community around a specific topic. This is nothing like embedding Twitter feeds or structure-heavy LinkedIn and Facebook stuff.

Let’s say you’re an enthusiast of Czech tramcars (that almost happened to me). You take photos of vintage cars rusting in far out rural locations. You participate in message boards reminiscing over the merits of the Tatra T6B5, somehow you secured a video of trams rumbling through a bygone communist city.

Then one day you find a Web site of like-minded enthusiasts and you see that they’ve put a link to their public wave. So you join it and find that a number of people have been debating the specs of the T6B5. You notice that scans of old documentation appear in the wave and someone has drawn diagrams around certain areas linking them to the related conversation. You remember that old video you had of one in action, so you insert it to the wave too. Oh, but wait you’re the only one looking at that moment–if the others were there you’d be chatting with them live. No problem. Even if someone isn’t typing directly back to you, they’ll see the update next time they open their Wave application and they’ll be able to reply.

Although my example above is not so serious, the point I’m making is that yes Google Wave lets you collaborate privately with those you invite but it also lets you open things up to the public in a way that didn’t exist previously. And you can make this happen just by clicking the “New Wave” button. Where else can you do that sort of thing? Traditional Web sites? Yes. Discussion forums? Yes. Video sharing sites? Yes. But you can’t do them all at once, seamlessly. I could keep listing things but you get the point, don’t you? Those will be challenged with this new disruption, and they’re not the only things.

I don’t even have to collaborate with people. I use Waves as my personal note-keeping medium. To-do lists, boring things like that. I could even publish my own personal Waves, like statuses on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, or blog posts (indeed I think I’ll try it on this site, stay tuned). Perhaps it has my likes and contact information as well. Public versions. Shared versions. Private versions.

Here’s another example. Wave has tremendous potential for “content producers.” Take a media/analyst company like the one I work for (TEC), where we send our subscribers e-mail newsletters, publish reports online, help companies through their software selections, host podcasts, etc. all based around enterprise software topics. We could be hosting waves around selected subjects with our analysts, writers, consultants, all participating whenever new issues arise. It would effectively subjugate (or augment if you prefer to see it that way) our other media initiatives. People that would normally subscribe to an e-mail newsletter, could join a wave instead and begin interacting at their leisure with whatever has occurred and become aware when something new occurs, and contribute their own input.

Waves may offer new promise for newspapers, musicians, all sorts of “content producers” if they harness the concept well.

My second point: the free and open-sourceness (wave protocol).

Social media mechanisms tend to decentralize Web content sources. They make it easy to spread articles, music, video, conversation, games, etc. beyond the boundaries of the originating Web sites. Facebook, for example, has taken over as one of the dominant destinations on the Web. I can go to facebook and communicate much as I would through e-mail, but I get potentially more out of Facebook because of the ways it sucks in the activities and interests of my selected peer group. That makes Facebook appealing and oh so sticky. But it is a single site, I do have to play within its boundaries, and not everyone that I can reach through e-mail is available, or even appropriate to reach through Facebook. Nor will they ever be because of two things: the rigidity inherent to its closed (single controlling company) structure and the domineering way it mediates my person-to-person communication.

So Facebook has some problems. In spite of all the various forms of access third parties can successfully take advantage of on top of the Facebook API, Facebook is a single company, with closed control. It’s essentially the same with Twitter, LinkedIn, and of most other social media sites (there are some possible exceptions like status.net/identi.ca).

Communication/collaboration mediums like e-mail on the other hand, owe much of their success to the fact that the platform isn’t controlled by a single company. Anyone can develop and proliferate e-mail servers and applications (desktop, web-based, smartphone apps, etc.). They work together by adhering to an open standard. It’s worked so well that e-mail has been one of the longest standing, most pervasive, and still highly relevant Internet applications. Unlike say, the social network MySpace: the fad that’s fading fast.

Social media innovated or reintroduced popular mechanisms for communicating-with other people via the Internet. Whereas most traditional Web sites had got themselves into the habit of communicating-to other people (which is fine, it serves a certain purpose–presenting or disseminating that which is authored, as it is authored). The Web site proper became the focal point. With social media mechanisms the web site is itself not so much the focal point as it is an aggregator and conveyor from other sites and between people (not the company operating it).

Social media sites generally lack user-facing content to communicate-to (except stuff developed by users themselves) but at the same time social media sites haven’t developed the full extent of communicating-with. The more the Web site itself fades from the focus and simply conveys person-to-person, the better it enables communicating-with as opposed to communicating-to. Facebook type companies are still too central to the communication they enable. On the other hand, Wave concocts a balance between the two, which is a disruptive innovation made possible because of the open source protocol. Wave wrests control from social networks by giving anyone the opportunity to form them, ad hoc,without a central overseer; like e-mail.

If Facebook or LinkedIn undergo a downward trend in popularity (Internet users’ have notoriously fickle tastes) or outright collapse, it will trigger a collapse in communication, data, the interactions within their communities. They thrive on critical mass and uptime. How about the proliferation of online office productivity applications? Those may allow users to collaborate in real time but they suffer the same problem as Facebook and LinkedIn, they’re a single entity conveying the communication.

The effort users have put into building their profiles, collecting the histories and online memories of their peers, attaching themselves to special interest groups, etc. will eventually be lost when sites like Facebook decline. Unlike e-mail, you can’t easily take Facebook with you. Some people have recognized this and have been working toward ways to get info out of online services. It doesn’t change the fact that we’ll never see a proliferation of Facebook servers offered by other companies.

This is fundamental: Google Wave is an implementation of an application that uses the open source Wave protocol but it’s not the only one, there will be others many of which might be quite different from Google Wave itself.

Wave, inherently made for live communication and collaboration, doesn’t risk hobbling its users through the fault of a single company or sag of popularity. Wave has every possibility of becoming popular the way e-mail did, since anyone can develop wave servers, clients, bots and extensions for the platform, etc. Other social media and work collaboration platforms cannot make a claim like that.

One more thing to consider. Building the Web on the Internet was an order of magnitude different from the rise of Web 2.0 apps. Web 2.0 sites are still, at heart, Web sites, they just do more. Wave on the other hand, is an order of magnitude different from the Web, since it’s emerging from it. Google Wave can do a better, more flexible, and more useful job subjugating portions of the “Web site proper” than any existing social media Web site.

If you’ve played with Google Wave and don’t get it yet, I strongly recommend reading the unofficial Complete Guide to Google Wave written by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. I found it very helpful. Read the section on making waves public to find public waves or also see this directory of public waves. There’s also Google’s discussion site. For a quick though far less informative overview try Lifehacker’s Google Wave 101 or The Shiny Wave’s cheatsheet. Also, some interesting extensions and prototypes.

* Update 20 May 2010: SAP’s Streamwork now supports Google’s Wave protocol. I’m glad they realized the wisdom in adopting wave rather than trying to make an isolated version of their own.

I wanted one of these mini notebook computers for several reasons. First, I was tired of banishing myself to my office when I wanted to work on my novel. It’s winter, I’d rather be sitting in front of a fire, listening to some music, and comfortable on the sofa. Not hidden away from my wife in another room.

Second, when I travel I like to travel light. Normal sized laptops have never seemed convenient to me for carrying onto an airplane. Most laptops are smaller than a regular computer but still big, heavy nuisances. Now that I’m used to my mini, standard sized laptops look like giant relics, the way mobile phones from the early 90s do.

I did a lot of research before buying. I compared the review sites. The main contenders seem to come from Asus, Acer, HP, MSI, and Dell though I’ve also seen a fair amount written on the Lenovo Ideapad and a host of others. Most netbooks come with pretty similar standard specs, like an 8.9″ display (now heading up to 10″), either solid state or regular hard drives, 512MB or 1GB memory, an Intel Atom processor, and a Linux variant (usually Ubuntu, Linpus, or SUSE) or Windows XP. I’m not sure what HP is thinking but their prices are way out of line with the other companies so they were easy to eliminate.

I decided on a system with 1 GB RAM and a 1.6 megapixel webcam for those occasional evenings where I want to have a pint or dinner with some long distance friends via Skype. (Also more pleasant in the living room than the office).

I also chose the Dell Mini with a 16GB solid state drive (SSD) over a regular hard drive. It seems to me that the price of extremely large capacity external hard drives is so low, that one might as well just buy an external drive to plug into the mini for all the major document storage. Then just use the Mini’s internal drive for the documents, photos, whatever that you want to bring while travelling or doing some immediate work on. Besides if you need extra memory while travelling, a USB memory stick or SD card are relatively inexpensive, very small and portable. A massive regular hard drive in the Mini doesnt’t seem very valuable to me. This choice eliminated the likes of MSI and Lenovo.

I’ve read that SSDs are faster, generate less heat, less prone to failure, and I love the idea of eliminating moving parts in my computer, especially since the fewer moving parts there are, the less noise the thing is likely to make. In fact, noise was one of my primary considerations. Something that sets the Dell Mini apart from every other mini notebook (netbook) I’ve researched is that it has no fan. I hate fan noise from computers, especially when I’m trying to hear some music and immerse myself into a creative state for writing. The Dell Mini, in its lack of fans and moving parts, is completely silent.

Based on reviews I read, it seemed that the Dell Mini’s keyboard size was just behind the Acer Aspire One’s but larger than the Asus Eeepc. Keyboard size is especially important if, like me, you intend to do a lot of touch typing. The Acer is mostly parallel to the Dell in other respects. There are some tradeoffs, for example the Acer has a lower grade webcam. But both the Acer and Asus have fans and when I listened to an Acer in a store it sounded quite noisy. So that pretty much eliminated the other contenders.

Although the Dell designers made a few strange keyboard choices, which require some adjustment the Dell Mini presents no significant problems to extended bouts of touch-typing. Examples of the strange choices? There are functional F11 and F12 keys but they’re not labeled as such. Also Dell chose a glaringly awkward place to put the apostrophe key, which is probably the single biggest design flaw I can think of. I’m adjusting, in time I probably won’t notice. I might even grow to love its placement. Years ago, my first car was an old Saab 900, which was famous for its quirks, like having the ignition on the floor instead of by the stearing wheel. I loved that.

The Dell Mini is silent, more attractive than any other netbook (in my opinion), and surprisingly fast. In a lot of forums, people tend to say that these new netbooks are slower than other laptops or desktops. That’s true in benchmarks I’ve seen. I assume that if you’re using it for heavy gaming or other intense processing the Mini might feel slow. For example, I haven’t experimented with any of my midi or other audio work on it yet but I suspect that the difference in speed will show up in that sort of situation. Nevertheless, for most of what I do the Dell Mini feels indistinguishable from my high-end 64 bit desktop system. Hook up a nice external monitor, keyboard, and mouse and I believe it would be perfectly fine doing double duty as a convenient desktop replacement for most people.

The operating system: here is a criticism of Dell. Dell promotes its Windows version. When I purchased my Mini, I went through the ordering process for both a Windows version and the Ubuntu Linux version. For an identical system, Dell offered a special deal, which strangely brought the Windows version price below the Ubuntu version. I haven’t used Microsoft products like Windows on a home computer in many years. I don’t like Windows and all of its problems. I don’t want to deal with viruses or digital restrictions. In most aspects I also think the Windows user interface is more difficult to use than Linux counterparts. In other words, there’s no good reason for me to pay for a computer with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. I wanted the Ubuntu version.

But Dell was doing a counterintuitive promotion and offering the Windows version cheaper than the Ubuntu version. So I bought the Windows version. When I received it, I immediately booted to an Ubuntu install USB drive and just overwrote the system with Linux. Now that might not seem like much of an issue however, the point is that it took me some time to do that. Dell would be providing a much better user experience if they would allow people to configure systems with Linux preinstalled for the same price if not less than the Windows version. I wonder how many other people did what I did.

The Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the LPIA architecture I understand is designed to take advantage of the low-power Intel Atom processor. It doesn’t come with the support for certain proprietary features like flash, but that can be easily added through a related repository.

I’d like to comment on the UNR edition of the Ubuntu distribution. Canonical seems to have put some serious effort and good intentions into developing a specialized interface, I think with a smart goal of better addressing the small screen space available in the netbook size. I tried this new interface and believe that while it has some interesting features (like the way it combines the taskbar with top of the windows), ultimately I chose not to use it. It covered the desktop with all the application icons in a cluttered, segmented menu system and it only allowed me to display one maximized window at a time. While that made the most of the desktop space, in my opinion it did so by removing useful functionality. Like the ability to have a couple windows open and dragging between them. I also disliked what I felt was a high quantity of clutter in the new interface.

Fortunately there’s a fairly simple option to switch back to the standard Gnome interface. If I were Dell, I would shipped the Mini this way. However, the standard Gnome setup in Ubuntu is not well suited to the Mini’s 1024×600 9″ display. The standard Ubuntu Gnome interface has a panel at the top of the screen and a window list panel at the bottom (so two chunks of screen space are always used up). Worse, the menu panel is segmented with lengthy text for each menu. I saved a lot of space by getting rid of one of these bars, removing the menu item text and substituting it with a single menu button icon. Now the only thing on my screen is a panel at the bottom that lets me easily access all my programs or places. I also find that the multiple desktop feature in Linux is more useful on the Mini because it minimizes window clutter on one desktop screen (plus the touchpad will nicely switch between desktops by brushing its top right corner). This solution seems to me like an easier way to make the best use of screen real estate without sacrificing the usability that most people expect. Plus it doesn’t require a whole new specialized interface. It’s essentially the same type of setup that you’d find on a Windows system or KDE interface–I think this setup works better.

I have a preference for KDE and would like to try the pretty new KDE 4.2 on my Mini, but I want to wait until there is an LPIA-specific version. In the meantime, I’ve grown to appreciate Gnome much more than I remembered and with the small changes I mentioned above, find it a totally comfortable, appealing, and usable interface. With Compiz effects installed too, the Mini’s interface is so elegant, it matches its hardware design.

Finally, the Dell Mini’s LED display is clear and bright as others have noted in far more detail than I. Aside from the slick design, noiselessness, price/features, speed, and Linux-capable nature, what else do I like?

Forget the technical aspects, the point is this computer feels, actually, personal. It’s a trusty aid available when I need it without demanding room space or other resources. I sit down in the living room and access whatever I want through the wireless Internet connection. I can write to my heart’s content with the Dell Mini comfortably on my lap (unlike most regular sized laptops). It’s not like an appliance that would degrade the appearance of the room. When I’m done I put it to sleep and toss it on the bookshelf–guests don’t even notice a computer is sitting there.

Nevertheless, if there was a school teaching how to compare products, Microsoft would’ve flunked. The first issue is a basic logical fallacy. You cannot necessarily apply a characteristic of one specific instance to the larger group and claim it to be true of the group as well. I happen to love spicy food, does that mean everyone named Josh loves spicy food? No. Microsoft’s link labeled “Compare Windows to Linux” goes to a page called “Compare Windows to Red Hat” so they’re comparing a specific linux distribution, Red Hat, with Windows but a visitor to the web site has clicked something leading him or her to think that s/he is reading information about Linux in general. Slimy as spam, that is.

The page is arranged like a large grid where the Y axis has a list of criteria on which the products are “compared” in two columns. The first criterion is total cost of ownership. In this criterion, Microsoft mentions Red Hat’s subscription fees for support (again Red Hat, not Linux distributions in general) but doesn’t discuss other costs that one would figure go into calculating total cost of ownership. The explanation glosses over how additional software components can be adopted in the first place, which may not require certain fees that would be present with Microsoft products. Though to its credit, Microsoft provides a report discussing support fees over time. I have not fully read that so I will not comment on it.

The more problematic issue is that when you read Microsoft’s own response to TCO it slants far from an apples-to-apples comparison of what it says about Red Hat. Even though it cites certain prices and issues with Red Hat it doesn’t offer parallel information for Microsoft. In other words, it is not a direct comparison and the reader is left in the dark about how the two actually compete here.

A well-constructed comparison would consistently and systematically compare the alternatives on the same criteria, using the same types of data so that the reader can understand what is similar or dissimilar. Forget that this is a marketing vehicle and forget that this is on Microsoft’s web site, which obviously has a strong interest to publish information biased toward its own products (I don’t mean to imply anything necessarily wrong with that). A critical reader of this comparison however, ought to be suspicious because it is constructed in such a way that it does not permit the reader to actually make a comparison on the terms it purports to. I think Microsoft would have a much more compelling page if it did a proper comparison rather than trying to trick readers with lousy logic and inconsistently responded criteria.

One last thing that interested me (I won’t go over these point-by-point), is at the bottom of the page. Microsoft states that open standards do not equal open source. Actually the page says

“Open Source is a software development and distribution model, which does not equate to how easily the software interoperates with other software or how open or standardized the interfaces are.”

I tend to agree with that characterization. I love that a typically proprietary vendor is saying this when so often I see proprietary software vendors flout their work on open standards as a method of deflecting the fact that their software is not open source. It’s as though they hope the similar sounding terms will stun questioners seeking open source.

Having said that, Microsoft talks about its own products in a way that attempts to make the reader feel the products are designed to be interoperable with everything. Reading carefully, Microsoft is not claiming so much to adhere to open standards as they are claiming that their products work with their own products and their partners’ products. They also mention competitors’ products and “engaging” in standards setting activities. Search news articles about open standards processes and they’ll be rife with commentary about Microsoft tactics at thwarting standards that don’t originate from a place sustaining Microsoft product dominance. Is that how it engages in standards setting activities?

I would argue that while open source doesn’t imply open standards, it could make developing open standards easier, since none of the software is locked behind proprietary secrecy. Rather, free and open source software enables anyone to study it and tinker so that common grounds can be engineered for standards–but then, from the outset, Microsoft also mischaracterizes free.

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Addendum: nice comment from Barbara French, refreshing a good linux.com link to an article about the previous campaign. 

“TWIKI.NET will provide premium support to a tested, reliable and secure version of TWiki. “We’re adding a professional company to a proven software platform so Fortune 500 companies and organizations of all sizes can feel safe, supported and secure while also accessing the innovation and flexibility of the TWiki solution,” added Beckström.”

Looks like they’re taking one of the common open source business models in hand, providing services to ensure dependability, upgrades, security, features, etc. A few years ago wikis seemed to be the little booth in the corner at trade shows, without a huge amount of people paying attention to why these would be useful in an enterprise context. Persistance seems to be paying off as these wikis continue to mature and gain acceptance, and most seem to be growing from their open source seeds. The list includes SocialText, Atlassian’s Confluence, XWiki, DekiWiki, and a lot of others.

One other thing of note, TWIKI.NET has a page with brief reasons why companies use an enterprise wiki–lots of interesting reasons.

Why did they underestimate the costs, which ballooned from the extra time required for the (still) incomplete implementation? The article suggests the lesson to be learned is never embark on a major project like this without employing a full-time project manager (which, surprisingly it sounds like this implementation lacked from the start). But there is something else to learn from the article:

“The academic software modules, particularly a grants and contracts management application, also did not perform as expected and have required extensive customization, said Laura Glatt, vice chancellor of administrative affairs at the Bismarck-based university system.”

I wonder why they did not expect this? Perhaps their original RFI/RFP was not designed to request that information? Did they script some demonstration scenarios for the vendor to show them how the modules would accomplish the sort of functionality they needed? I’d think there could have been some way to prevent this issue–maybe the ghost of a full-time project manager would have thought of that during the selection and evaluation phases.

The company’s press release (linked above) has CEO, Janke, stating “…the market’s demand for our product has outgrown our capability to scale the business accordingly.” And then Boisvert mentions that Compiere’s in a good position with its “…modern architecture at a time when many proprietary legacy ERP systems are approaching the end of their intended life cycle.” That sort of growth should keep Compiere’s model vibrant.

In April the company announced seven new implementation partners, which I think bodes well for its business model–a model largely based on second level support and training (in other words supporting its partners). The more partners implementing it the better. The company had a little over forty toward the end of 2004 and now claims more than seventy. Hopefully the additional funding truly will help it scale for those partners’ demands.