Microsoft screws me, Google seduces me

Being a bit of a luddite, I'm always a few years behind the game with technology, including developments on the internet. So maybe it will take me a year or two to catch on to Google Wave. But even I can see that Google is transforming the world with their innovations while Microsoft seems capable of nothing but crap software, financial bullying and monopolistic practice.

David and Aale have been commenting here about how great Wave is. It seems to me to be yet another chat channel, just what the world doesn't need. But today I saw a clever app a company has built around Google Street View, and just this week I finally discovered - and was blown away by - Google Earth. I love Google Docs (though it is still hopelessly basic in some areas) and even I cottoned on to Google Maps, Alerts and iGoogle some time ago. I don't use gmail but in another life I would. My life as a webmaster revolves around Analytics, and Adsense almost pays the hosting fees. So we'll see with Wave. Once all the hoopla dies down and we can get past the gee-whiz novelty of simultaneous updating, Google's track record suggests to me there may well be more to it.

Which is more than I can say for Microsoft, the company that gave us Vista, Sharepoint and Access, three major blows to business productivity, and Vista, MSN and Bing, three failures of personal computing. Sure Word is fantastic (but it should be after twenty years, and Wordperfect was better) and Outlook works OK and seldom cripples my PC these days. But I regard WinXP as Mickeysoft's last gasp. Incapable of winning the search game fair and square, Microsoft has to resort to buying marketshare by consorting with that whining dinosaur Murdoch to plot private fences for the Web. Talk about true colours.

Comments

Invite available

Rob,

As I mentioned in another note (CMDB thread), I have an invite I'll be happy to make available to you, if you'll commit to using it.

Btw, I don't know if Google Wave will be great. What I've said is that I can see lots of extraordinary possibilities and potential for the tool. I'm not in charge of execution or budgets, so as good as it looks, it may turn out to fizzle. :-)

David

I'll wait

Thanks David, but I have a Wave account. I've watched all the how-to videos and tried using it.

For now I'll wait until someone more inventive than me sees more in it than a realtime chat page with attachments

Joining the wave

Rob, and others

Seriously I think there is some useful ITSM debate going on in Google wave,involving the usual suspects, whilst at the same time the time over head to process it is considerably less than with Twitter.

http://completewaveguide.com/

pull it all together

so we have discussion going on in articles, papers, blogs, comments, forums, linkedin groups, twitter and now wave. Methinks a little rationalisation is going to be required. perhaps Wave can pull it all together

Inevitable

I think it is inevitable that some of those channels will die...and that other alternatives will appear. Wave is very clunky as things stand, socially as well as technically. If it gets better it could well have a place as a replacement that combines the best of Twitter and Linkedin groups, but there is a danger it will also be abused in the same way as Linkedin groups, and be as irrelevant as much Twitter traffic is. I would agree with David and Aale that the ITSM debates on wave so far have been very productive though.

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