Google Wave and the Difficulty of Radical Change

cedarhillbilly writes "An article by Matt Asay in the Register takes on Google Wave from the perspective of visionary change versus incremental change. He suggests that visionaries should focus on smaller transformations of our day-to-day lives rather than leapfrogging. 'Much as it may want to radically change the world for users and developers, radical change generally happens over time, through a series of incremental, unexceptional edits to existing technology and processes.' Perhaps Google sensed this when they famously said they were worried about having too many geniuses. Asay revisits the point that the open source development model necessarily builds on a community of contributors and users, and not the mad scientist in an ivory tower."

Comments

and perhaps because Google involved?

[Ilgaz]

What would happen if this was some anonymous project hosted at sourceforge instead? Some really untraditional open source software, looking to problem in different (very different!) angle has been successful. While "old school fans" hate what it has become, I can give Azureus. Think about it and remember the product it was racing against, compare both. The "simple application" it was racing against has become so problematic so they ended up acquiring something that was supposed to compete against them, as alternative.

Perhaps Google fools themselves thinking everyone buys their "don't be evil" slogan and trust them. Why would I trust some side project of an advertising giant? You know, if you are a Chrome extension developer, prepare your $5, just at front page today. Now, if some miracle happens and actual open source developers say "oh really? here is your account revocation", will Chrome extension project called "too innovative"?