Morph London

Email isn’t dead but it should be

Google has just announced the launch of a new product called Google Wave. Its a new real-time communication platform that will be released to the public later this year. Its effectively an instant messenger (IM), but as with most of Google’s other products its features and integration methods will outclass any other product on the market.

There is a mass of buzz and excitement surrounding this product, and at the time of writing the Internet is saturated with reviews, articles and news. Being great fans of their products we just had to add another to the mix.

Does the Internet need yet another IM? they already have their own (Google Talk) and Microsoft has Live Messenger. There are numerous fancy features, but its Google’s ability of teaching us how to use these tools in ways that we didn’t think of that makes this really useful.

Starting with the basics I can message my colleague with a paragraph of this blog post, they can then look through this and check my inevitable mistakes and message back their improved paragraph, Talk and Messenger can already both do this.

Now this is where the Google magic happens, something so simple yet it changes the whole dynamic of the process. If you teach me to make the text area bigger I can post the entire post into the message or “Wave” and it now becomes a document. Not very practical for my colleague to post it all back, but here Google allows them just to edit my original Wave. So document collaboration is achieved.

Microsoft has had market dominance with Messenger for years and they certainly have the infrastructure to develop this simple change. Yet Messenger hasn’t really developed, its has pretty much the same functionality as when it started. They just don’t seem to have the creative thinking that Google has. Even Microsoft’s latest project Bing (a search engine) isn’t anything we haven’t seen before with Google Search.

Google Wave bridges the gap between Google Docs document collaboration, Gmail and IM. And it has some great features like showing the message in real-time as you type. A spell checker (Spelly) that uses their whole search database to correct words in context of their sentences, in the demo they typed “Icland is an Icland” and Wave automatically corrected it in real-time to “Iceland is an Island”. Waves can be added into blogs, you can wave maps and gadgets and they have robots that integrate into 3rd party services such as Twitter.

So is email dead? are we all going to be communicating by Waves? I fear not. While I have no doubt that just like Gmail and Docs, Waves are going to be the best way to collaborate and communicate on the Internet. The majority of the corporate world is going to stay stuck in their old ways using an outdated mentality, infrastructure and technology.

Morph London offers clients Gmail and Docs support and setup, and in every case its been a dramatic improvement on their previous infrastructure. In our commitment to offering our clients the latest tools and services to improve their work-flow we will certainly be recommending they upgrade to Waves, and hopefully we can help move everyone in the right direction one company at a time.