Re:What problems does Google Wave solve?
by 10ren on Thursday October 15, 2009 @08:13AM
(#883217)
Crossing the Chasm had a distinction between applications and platforms. The latter are harder to sell, but scale horizontally, leading to massive adoption. Potentially.
Wave seems to be a platform. It needs a killer app in order to be adopted. Often, this happens through hitching a ride on some bigger change, like faster hardware.
There are plenty of great technologies that never got adopted. It actually seems common for a second-rate but good-enough version of a technology to win, because actual adoption is a huge challenge in itself. Perhaps a greater challenge than creating the technology in the first place. In pg-land, it's the "people want" part of "make something people want".
There's great opportunity here for the one who can apply Wave to alleviate a felt pain.
Re:What problems does Google Wave solve?
by jaaron on Thursday October 15, 2009 @09:43AM
(#883349)
Only geeks see it as a platform. The current Google Wave client feels like a single, unified application just like GMail (compared to a platform like 'email'). The current wave client _is_ the killer app.
Wave seems to be a platform. It needs a killer app in order to be adopted. Often, this happens through hitching a ride on some bigger change, like faster hardware.
There are plenty of great technologies that never got adopted. It actually seems common for a second-rate but good-enough version of a technology to win, because actual adoption is a huge challenge in itself. Perhaps a greater challenge than creating the technology in the first place. In pg-land, it's the "people want" part of "make something people want".
There's great opportunity here for the one who can apply Wave to alleviate a felt pain.