What, you don’t want your plain text email “on crack”?

Ok, probably not the most appealing analogy. But you’re right, people like simple. And I think the elegance by which Wave does what it claims is no doubt going to be a deciding factor in its future viability.

Personally I have mixed feelings. For myself, as someone who works in IT, I think I could benefit from the added collaboration. However, for my users, I could see this being very difficult to integrate into their communication methodologies and I don’t think I would want the task of overseeing that project. As a quick example, few years ago we integrated into our corporate email system a MS chat program called Unified Communications Server (a glorified Microsoft Instant Messenger basically). The user feedback was mixed and in very simple terms broke down like this:

• With good written communicators, the technology didn’t prosper
• With poor written communicators, the technology was accepted

I think its worth noting, within our company the typically good written communicator was older and less comfortable with computers. As you can guess, the poor written communicator was younger and more comfortable with computers and IM technology. However, we did end up having quite a few communication conduct problems spring up after this role out.

Wave might fall somewhere in between…or it might change the way we communicate altogether. Like you said, it’s too soon to tell.