Google Wave and MS Bing

The latest attempt to break the Google stranglehold on the search market is Microsoft’s new product: Bing (Bing Is Not Google). If you’d like to check it out for yourself then I suggest you head over to http://bing.com but don’t worry about breaking a sweat to get there. Bing is pretty uninspired visually and the back-end functionality feels more like Microsoft is catching up with Google, not surpassing it or even changing the game.

The issue is that Microsoft continues to look at projects with an engineer’s eyes; in very black and white terms. “If we can build a better search engine than Google we win.” This constant focus on competition instead of community keeps Microsoft falling short. Microsoft should look for ways to create new community instead of just “better tools” as a way to grow sustainable innovation (and thus fan base).

Of course this past week there was a new product that has shown innovation and community centered philosophy. And of course it is Google’s new product (protocol?) called Wave.

Before you sink your teeth into the Google Wave Developer Preview video which is 1.5 hours long and worth every minute (the very last demo will blow your mind) I want to relate to you where I see this application being a game changer for organizations and individuals.

Google Wave is based on the idea of conversations as opposed to messages (along with about 100 other innovations) and the engineers have done a fantastic job of accomplishing that. There is a lot of speculation about whether or not people will adopt to this product, to “catch the wave” or whatever. The advantages that Google are hoping pay off are:

• That the product lets you integrate so much work-flow that it would be difficult not to use it,
• The work-flow is all about collaboration and building community through sharing of control and content,
• They are making it open source so anyone can implement it and develop off of it, and;
• Everything happens inside the browser using HTML5 so you don’t have to deal with device dependencies.

The technological advances that allow the level of control sharing are unbelievable and the closest comparison I could make to this in our physical world would be the types of decentralized leadership being practiced by groups such as The Art of Hosting.

When you consider the social changes that are currently underway around the world you see that this product is directly in line with those changes. Google let the community dictate the direction of their solution instead of the engineers. What I mean this; current trends show the digital leaders (and their networks) are using online tools to share and create things without the hierarchy and centralized control of the past.

This digitalocracy of people are ignoring the protocols of society to create their own solutions to business, organization, community and even individual problems by collaborating online, sharing transparently and crowdsourcing.

Breaking big problems down into smaller chunks and allowing the group to solve them and then fit the pieces back together has become second nature to many of us and this is exactly how Google Wave approaches collaboration, conversation and problem solving. Taking it one step further is that Google Wave allows for a report out and harvest of every collaboration making it not just a fantastic tool for building collaboration and community but also for knowledge management and growth.

One of the biggest walls stifling the digitalocracy is the bureaucracy built into our current systems. If a new application like Google Wave can find its way into our current systems then by the nature of how it empowers everyone to be equals and to work communally we will in fact see a change in how organizations function.

So, without further ado I present the Google Wave Developer Demo: