Google Wave
Every once in a while, a technology comes along, which really change the way we think about technology at large, and pushes the envelope. Google is often behind those disruptive technologies, and Google Wave is no exception.
Google Wave is merging many of the “boundaries” we’ve taken for granted so far. Frontiers between instant messaging and asynchronous messaging; frontiers between Web 2.0, email and traditional document; frontiers between traditional and collaborative realtime editing, even the time frontier…
Replay of “wave” or conversation thread, annotation and highlighting of changes, concurrent online editing, automatic update of blogs or orkut pages, narrow-down by user or paragraph, version control, intelligent spellchecking… There are too many cool features to even scratch the surface here.
Google Wave is as close to the vision of the Future of Documents as it gets – evergreen, social, intelligent. And all of that in any browser, or even on Android phones, using good (not so) old HTML 5.
Watch the video and find out for yourself. It’s long, but it’s well worth the time.
Any thoughts/ideas on how Xerox can harness the “Wave” for it’s own advantage?
Good question. I think we need to reinforce a vision that is coherent with the Wave’s, and figure out how onramps and offramps of paper documents can still be supported in this new world of a defragmented, distributed “document”.
Easy to say, of course…
One possibility is to take advantage of the reality that fixing a conversation or document in Print creates a value of it’s own. Once a document is fixed it is much easier to apply compare and contrast, which is just another name for considered thought.
Xerox might consider less emphasis on it’s own document management systems in favor of more creating seamless easy to implement SaaS solutions to print on Xerox equipment from the workgroup to the Igen4.
How about Verox: The Virtual Document Company?
P.S. Do NOT open verox.com, it is blacklisted as a virus site.