On 2010-09-25 at 08:53 -0400, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > If it's apple-only, you can only call it "the new standard" like google wave > was the new standard to replace email. It bombed because they weren't > friendly with non-google email accounts. In order to use wave, you could > only sign in using your gmail account, and you could only communicate with > other gmail users. Wanna talk to someone who isn't on gmail? Too bad.
This is not only a mis-characterisation in part, it's also untrue. [disclaimer: while employed by $G, I've never been involved with Wave other than as a user; this post, like all of my LOPSA posts, is written in a strictly personal capacity] This is a germane sysadmin topic, as it concerns models of communication and authentication (and product launches, etc). So while I might have bitten my tongue, I think this reply is appropriate for this audience. Wave's only relationship to email is that it's federated and the developers pushed a model of companies being able to choose between installing their own servers or outsourcing to the cloud. The standards are openly published, http://www.waveprotocol.org/ and the code is available and various people do run their own Wave servers, against their own authentication providers. Your assertion is like claiming that you can only exchange email with people who have a gmail account, because you need a gmail account to sign into gmail and gmail is one of the biggest providers. The only difference is that Google's hosted Wave was predominant and other installs haven't taken off. It was also always very clearly an alpha product, but people got so used to permanent-beta of Google products that they assumed there was no meaning to such qualifiers and first hyped it up, then slammed it when it failed to live up to expectations. Google's certainly in a tough position when it comes to putting out *experiments* and having people play and give feedback, instead of expecting final products. Heck, even Google didn't claim to know what niche or killer role Wave might have. It was put out anyway, as cool technology and to see what happened. There are good things and bad things to say about Wave. It's really quite decent for taking meeting minutes, both during the meeting and collecting feedback from people who missed the meeting but can illuminate certain points. Also for general discussion and early sketching out of ideas where you want a more discussion-oriented model, instead of a Wiki model. But hey, Google opted to discontinue it. Nice easy target to pick on. -Phil _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
