Developing Wave

Google announced its newest product at the Google I/O conference in California this week, Google Wave. Wave is a new collaberative media concept and program. It is intended to be an all encompasing email, chat and social networking scheme. What strikes me as interesting is the process of creating this new product and how the Google corporate atmosphere effects how the product is developed. The idea for wave was originated not by corporate nor was it even customer driven. Rather it is the brainchild of two brothers who asked the question. "What would email look like it it were developed today?"

"Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps. As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold," explains Lars Rasmussen.

So it seems that Lars and Jen Rasmussen came up with the idea, and sold it to their bosses at Google. These guys do have a track record, these are the guys that developed Google Maps. It seems to me a remarkable show of faith that American based Google would let this remote team in Australia run with this. Then again this is Google and they do things differently

When Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn't impressed. "He came to me and he said 'This may sound kinda crazy, but we're going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we'll get back to you after a couple of years,'" Brin remembers. "It was not a very compelling proposal."

But Brin greenlighted the project anyway. After Google acquired their Where 2 Tech startup in 2004, Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens had spearheaded the Google Maps project, and in an extreme case of Google's much-lauded commitment to creative freedom, Brin gave the pair just what they asked for.

"Lars and Jens had previously redefined what mapping was like - they already had a success under their belt - and communications was one of those trigger topics," Brin told reporters yesterday afternoon at Google's I/O developer conference in downtown San Francisco. "We decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was also an interesting experiment. It was one of the most autonomous development groups we've had at Google."

The way Brin tells it, the decision allowed the Chocolate Factory to "innovate how we run things." But by all accounts, this amounted to letting the Rasmussens do whatever they wanted. The result - after two years of development - is Google Wave, the new-age communication and collaboration tool the company unveiled on Thursday to a standing ovation from hundreds of gathered developers.

Not only did they get a green light to go with a project that wasn't a "corporate" idea. No one seems to have given much thought to a marketing plan. The thought sems to be if the product is good enough someone will figure out a way for it to pay the bills.

As Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering put it, "One of the luxuries about working at Google is that we get to focus on building the technology and making users happy, and once we've achieved a certain amount of success in terms of user happiness, only then do we start working about how to make money from it."

With engineering projects such as Wave, Gundotra later added, "We don't think about what competitors are doing... We believe that you build for the user and the rest will follow. Part of the excitement is rethinking the problem and coming up with a fresh approach."

When one reporter questioned whether he was telling the whole truth, Gundotra quickly repeated himself. And judging from Google's track record, we're inclined to believe him. At least for the moment, the company's top-secret search money machine is pulling in more than enough dough to fund such idealism.

No one can doubt that Google can make money, even in the days of a reccession. While the idiea of turning the designers and engineers loose, Worry about marketing and sales plan later. And turn the code and APIs to the open source world, seems contridictory, There can be no doubt that Google will make it work.

posted by Ray L. @ 7:12 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.