I was going to write an article about Google Wave, what it is, whether it is something to get excited about or not etc. etc. However I would only be writing something that will have been written by others all over the web. If anyone has found some great “What it is and why to get excited” type articles please send me a link.

Google Wave has reminded me of a product I got very excited about before, a product which now is part of MS Office but one that rarely gets talked about; Groove. I thought I would look back and try to understand the reasons Groove did not become as big as I expected and see any of these reasons apply to Google Wave.

Groove was the idea of Ray Ozzie creator on Lotus Notes who founded Groove Networks in 1997. The first beta was released in 2000 and as a Lotus Notes/Domino developer at the time working on collaboration software it certainly got my attention.

The idea of Groove was to create a system that enabled people inside and outside an organisation to collaborate on work together over the web. The idea was that it would make it easy for users to form virtual workgroups and start collaborating, communicating and sharing documents in real time very quickly and in a secure way.

Early version of Groove had many of the features which would not look out of place in Google Wave. Groove had instant messaging that appeared as you typed and allowed real time collaborative editing of documents. It also had discussions and an interactive whiteboard and build in together with voice and video conferencing for example. It allowed developers to build their own plugin apps using an XML based language I never really understood. In 2001 this was something really impressive and I was sure that it was going to be big.

For me the best thing about it was that it had a peer to peer desktop client so each user had a full copy of the data that was synchronised with other users over the web and was available offline. There was no central server.

So why did Groove not take over the world? At the time I remember there were the following objections from businesses that prevented its takeup:

• Speed – the peer to peer model used XML messages to sync all changes which used a lot of network traffic. The client too was hugely resource intensive and even powerful PCs at the time were reduced to a crawl.
• Managability- the lack of a central server meant that there was perceived to be no control of the data. How do you backup? How do you manage users etc. The “enterprise server” was a long time coming.
• Client Installation – The client needed to be installed on the users PC and from what I remember setup was not straight forward.
• Security – Businesses were put of by the P2P model. In 2001 people the only thing people thought about when they heard P2P was Napster and piracy. Bosses ran a mile from the idea of having their sensitive business data on a system that used P2P and not knowing how many copies of data there were and who had them was terrifying.
• Timing – Groove was started in the dotcom boom but not released until the bubble had burst.
• Price – you had to pay for it and it wasn’t that cheap. Businesses were suffering from a downturn and there wasn’t the money about for enterprises to make bug investments.
• Developer Community Support – Groove was difficult to develop for (in my experience) and there was little help available.
• Its was different – Groove was very different to most things which came before and so was a hard to explain the advantages of it.

In many ways I see Google Wave as being similar to Groove in concept but do I think it will suffer from the same problems:

• Speed – NO – technology has moved on and other GWT applications are pretty quick in Chrome for example.
• Manageabiliy – NO – from what I understand companies can run their own server if they want.
• Client Installation – NO – web based.
• Security – MAYBE – No P2P barrier but businesses will still need to (or believe they need to) trust Google with their data.
• Timing – NO – in a recession again but Google are not asking people to pay for it.. yet.
• Price – NO – I have not seen any enterprise pricing but believe it is free to start with.
• Developer Community Support – NO – open apis, documentation, lots of interest from developers and familiar tools to develop with.
• Its different – MAYBE – Things that are different will always be difficult to sell to enterprises however if people take to it in other parts of their life it will be interesting to introduce.