Google's announcement last week of their new (and I believe revolutionary) Wave communications platform has taken a while to sink in with some commentators, but as it has, it has unleashed a torrent of contemplation and analysis. In my view, that's a good sign; it's thought provoking and provides some substantive mechanisms to address common yet unsolved problems in digital communications, binding together person-to-person and person-to-group messaging and bundling in the capability to integrate files as a usable part of the message, and in turn allowing the entire system to be integrated into other applications with the public release of the API.

I am pre-disposed to this approach since it resembles one I have advocated for some time to circumvent the increasingly dark tar pit that electronic mail has become; Wave (conceptually, at least) solves the issues far better than I might have imagined. My take on it can be found here.

A longer, more considered, and more specifically enterprise-oriented take is offered by Dion Hinchcliffe. He makes the same point as I do that while the problems have been understood for some time and various solutions proposed, Google is among the very few organizations that is in a position to deliberately and successfully change the paradigm that we have afflicted ourselves with. He sees a future for you with Wave in it. The API and integration options will allow enterprises to pull Waves in gradually, without tremendous disruption to existing client-side software or processes, and to integrate the new approach seamlessly with existing technologies. Hinchcliffe sees a lot of reasons why the enterprise will want to go through this exercise: "Waves are a natural integration point for many enterprise services including ECM, SOA, mashups, and more."

Wave simply addresses too many problems to not be worth a look. Google has a history of chucking stuff at the wall and seeing what will stick, and while this may simply be another case of that eccentric product marketing methodology, I think Wave has got a lot of stickiness to it. If for some reason it does not succeed (most likely due to Google's equally eccentric approach to enterprise marketing and support) I think it's safe to say that something similar will. Wave shows a glimpse of the potential of the digital platform to revolutionize communication, in ways that make previous efforts pale in comparison.