Judging by the pitiful stats that Wave is getting (there’s some hitwise stats recently that show Wave is swiftly becoming as big of a flop as the Nexus One’s week one sales), they could use someone on staff who can actually explain what this platform can do.

Of course, this is because Google almost exclusively hires codemonkey engineers.

That’s great for their software & systems work, but it means that they consistently fail at things where they’re required to interface with “real” people (i.e. customer service, and PR/Marketing — again, the Nexus One fail is a good example).

If you are going to do a comparison leaving out Microsoft’s would be a big ommision.

The purpose of this chart is to explain Google Wave in terms of its similarities and differences from existing group collaboration offerings. It is by no means complete. For space reasons, I left out a LOT of issues, like federation, extensions, mobile, add-ons, details of how different things are handled. Again, this is meant to be a broad, at-a-glance overview.

In general if something required an external add-on, I didn’t consider that a feature of the product or type of product. I realize that comparing types of products (forums, wikis) against specific products (Google Docs, Wave) is apples-to-oranges, but again, this is a BROAD overview. I don’t feel that a particular wiki or forum product can represent the entire genre the way Google Docs represents web-based office suites. I didn’t have the space to get into the nitty gritty of one forum or wiki product over another. THAT chart would have been monstrous.

So, yes, I made a few generalizations here both in and not in Wave’s favor. (For example, there is a Wave bot that exports blips, but IMO it sucks, so I didn’t give Wave a “yes” for exporting documents.)

Again, this chart is for the purpose of illustrating to readers of a book about Wave how Wave compares to similar types of products. My apologies for having to generalize a bit for the sake of space.

The way I use this is by inserting links to pages in etherpad from notes in notepub.

In the above list it looks a bit like you have listed all the functions of Wave and then compared them with other systems. Then it’s logical that Wave wins.

As for the last point: it is possible to make a bot that exports the wave. That’s what I think is the greatest feature of Wave: the ability to access the data through an api an build extensions.

I could draft a similar chart saying that my iPhone compares favorably to a phone, a media player, a GPS unit, a PDA, and a UMPC, but it would be hugely misleading to not mention Android Phones, the Pre, Symbian, etc etc. In that vein, the omission of Basecamp, Sharepoint, and so on give the false impression that Wave is unique in its class.

Hope this formating comes out…

Feature
Microsoft Office Web Access

A
single, hosted copy of a conversation or document
Yes

The
ability to see when contacts are online
Yes

Instant
messaging or chat, with no-refresh updates
Yes

Keystroke-by-keystroke
live updates with multiple visible cursors
No

Simultaneous
editing of one document by multiple collaborators
Yes

Edit
rights to other participants’ contributions
Yes

The
ability to see and compare past versions
Yes

Interactive
maps, videos, polls and other widgets
Limited

Inline
replies and threaded conversations
No

Ability
to easily publish the conversation or document
Yes

User
access permissions (read-only or edit)
Yes

Ability
to easily link documents to each other
Yes

Ability
to export the finished document to a file
Yes

-DO tell you when someone is online (at least SMF, IPB, and vB all do).
-May contain chatboxes or shoutboxes, can easily be setup by webmaster. Some are AJAX with no page refresh required.
-Nearly all forums have usergroups, and you can edit posts by any usergroup that is your level or below.
-Forums can easily have widgets added to them. It is very easy to setup a custom bbcode that allows users to add in these types of widgets just like wave has them.
-vBulletin 4 has just released a beta CMS, so you easily add in articles and other stuff. So this should be ‘Some’.
-In forums, you can easily link together groups, or well it’s not too hard to do anyways, but it is entirely possible. You can either setup topics with similar headers, or have differentiated sections for each forum.

Also you forgot about Etherpad, which many thousands of users DO use!

I can’t really label that “feature” or describe it very well, but I hope you get what I mean.

It can very quickly turn into a mess with replays to topics of the same “level” as subthreads to others. In a document or on a wiki I could move a section or a page. Of course I can edit a single message in Wave, but the structure of the conversation can still be very much messed up.

/Pär