Lately I’ve been getting quite a few questions about Google Wave: what do I think about it, how do I see it being used, will it replace email and how, and many more.
for the record, I love the idea of Google Wave. While I might not be the biggest fan of the hype surrounding it or the seemingly counter-productive release strategy (why Google chose to release a closed system product that relies on social interactions through a scarcity model I’ll never quite understand), I do think the concept behind the product is great. Being able to centrally track all the different branches that inevitable clutter the “reply to all” landscape of an all-inclusive email chain is very appealing. Giving latecomers to the party the ability to run the tape back and step through the instant-replay in a way that can make sense of the fractal-ness is a very good thing.
The real challenge of WaveAnd while I love the idea of Wave, I fear that it is a technology that is woefully ahead of its time. The biggest problem with Wave, at least to my way of thinking, is not in the functionality, the implementation or the execution. The biggest problem with Wave will come with its adoption.
By positioning it as an quasi-email replacement, the Wave team will end up facing what Seth Godin describes in his blog “Can’t Top This” – they’ll find themselves trying to prove that what they’re selling does email better than email. They’ll find themselves trying to prove that even though their system isn’t totally integrated into the mobile experience, its better than email. They’ll find themselves trying to prove that even though their product isn’t hooked into newsletters, email notifications (Facebook, flickr, etc), its better than email. And even if they’re not going to position their product against all the many uses of email to which we’ve all grown so accustomed, they’ll have to show us how passing around that PowerPoint deck for team review by Wave is different than passing around that PowerPoint deck for team review via email.
The business caseMore and more these days it seems that many product discussions begin and end with the business case. Even in better economic times, it was increasingly imprudent to pursue a product without a clear constituency in mind. This, of course, is an incredibly good thing: having these discussions early and often force us both to set clear goals and objectives for the product as well as clearly define the feature sets and use cases we’d like to pursue. Continuously asking “what’s the business case?” is, in short, a good thing.
The flipside: scientific discoveryIn a previous life I spent quite a bit of time in science research. And while nearly every grant written in basic science research will tie the work back to key understandings in major disease processes, much of the work (on the academic side, at least) is devised and carried out without a clear commercial/medical/practical objective in mind.
I’ll never forget the day I sat in a seminar given by my advisor, listening to an M.D. asking the oft-repeated $1M question of “What does this mean for my patients?” My advisor, a man who had heard that question a few too many times for his liking, went on to make what I thought was a very important distinction, albeit in a not-so-eloquent way: “What does it mean for your patients? I don’t know what it means for your patients. But then again, I don’t know that I care what it means for your patients either. I care about the science, someone else will care about how it relates to the patients.”
The X-Ray. Penicillin. The electron. All of them things that were discovered and studied without the slightest idea as to their practical application or commercialization potential. But in the end, all three went on to do quite well from both a societal and commercial standpoint.
Are we crowding out discovery, or simply “outsourcing” it?There must be, of course, a balance between discovery and commercialization. We must be able to go off on exploratory flights of fancy to wherever the wind may take us while at the same time remembering that we do have bills to pay. Where is that balance, and can we find both within the same organization?
Current models in technology and medicine suggest that its not possible for both to peacefully coexist under the same roof. In pharma, for example, much of the development pipeline is being filled by acquisition rather than “organic growth.” Risk profiles, economics, operations and culture all net out to a partnership between startups (academic or otherwise) dealing in discovery and larger companies dealing in commercialization. Other areas of medicine follow similar models, as does much of Silicon Valley.
What’s next?I’m not saying that keeping the business case in mind is necessarily a bad thing, nor am I saying that discovery for its own sake is bad. The point of this post is to wonder whether there’s some way for the two to gracefully coexist in the New World Order.
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