Google Wave, “free” software and Ray Ozzie

Microsoft announcing its gratis forthcoming Office suite online reminds us how lucky we are to again have such competition. Google made Docs available – with probably 85% of the features 85% of the people will ever use – gratis. Them fighting it out is everyone else’s win.

Google’s certainly formidable. Microsoft has Ray Ozzie, though, and he seems to be coming into his own. Ray Ozzie created Lotus Notes. Ray Ozzie created Groove. Both Notes and Groove had (have) shared workspaces, “presence awareness” (i.e. who’s online now working on this thing I am), synchronization / replication (e.g. so changes to my local copy of something I make offline or from my home computer can be synced up with the shared copy once I’m online or back at the office) and tools for embedding and sharing and collaborating on larger projects. Google Wave is going to do a lot of these same kinds of things.

No small difference is that – with gWave – these things will occur in a browser; no additional client software will be required. Another no-small-thing is the tools and protocols used will be Open Source.

There’s a good deal of excitement about the kinds of collaboration that will be possible with gWave. That’s good not because it necessarily represents new kinds of collaboration, but because Google’s getting it front-and-center in peoples’ minds. New attention means new developers making new tools used by more people.

Not coïncidentally, Google also just launched a tool to help move Lotus Notes customers to Google Apps. Google is smart enough not to dismiss Ray Ozzie – or his legacy – out of hand. The competition in collaborative platforms, services available on the web (“in the cloud”), and priced – gratis or cheap – for gaining marketshare, is good for us all.