Google Wave Archive

The post below was originally posted on the Zoho blog and is authored by Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement.

It is easy to dismiss all this with “Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft,” but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google’s innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight?

It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let’s recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft’s commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome …), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple’s resurgence – based on design prowess, not platform dominance – and Vista’s failure, have demonstrated that convincingly.

Continue reading “Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters” »

Yesterday for a brief moment, lots of tech bloggers removed the twitter auto-post function and replaced it with excitement over the Google Wave announcement. I’ve read posts that say Google Wave will replace the Web as we know it and then I read posts that say nearly the opposite. I am just wondering, did anyone else immediately think that Google Wave looks nearly identical to Microsoft Outlook?

For reference, the main blue color in Outlook is #e3efff and in Google Wave the main blue color is #c9e2fc. Google Wave has pretty pictures too. I think if you add the Xobni plugin into Outlook, the screenshots get even closer.
Continue reading “Is it Outlook or Google Wave?” »