A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

PLM Wave Or “Good Enough” Collaboration

PLM Wave Or “Good Enough” Collaboration
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
5 August, 2010 | 2 min for reading

Six months ago, I posted “Collaboration Trends or Why I Stopped Using Google Wave?“. After Google’s announcement about Google Wave termination yesterday, I read it again. Actually, I found it very consistent to my feeling back in January 2010. Here is my top 4 list of Google Wave problems:  (1) Isolation. (2) Another application to run. (3) Documents and other Google App integration. (4) Inbox management.

In all streams of information related to Google’s decision about the wave, the following tweet got my top score. If you remember, Google Wave supposed to re-invent email. During all of my experiments with Google Wave, I wanted to bring it back to my email. Does it mean email is so good?

Email and “Good Enough” Principle

How many times when you asked a developer about a particular feature, you’ve heard the following answer – “but, this is cool…”? I agree, coolness is a definitely important factor. However, when it comes to some zones in our life, coolness is not what we expect. There is something I call – mainstream communication. Email is part of this. You want to have a predictable result from sending email. Email works in a seamless way. Email is the one, I need. Yes, it is 20 years old with almost no change. But sometimes, it is simply “good enough”.

“False Start” and Collaboration Demands

I’m sure you are familiar with the term – “false start“. I think we have a sort of false start in many efforts related to collaboration. When it comes to phone calls, chat, video, screen sharing it seems to me reasonable. However, sometime, we need to take a breath and… think. Not to collaborate, but think. Therefore, one of the Google Wave features, such as, “typing together” – a cool Google Wave feature, can be considered as a ‘false start’. And this is not the only one…

PLM Collaboration

Some of  my initial thoughts about PLM collaboration in the context of what happened with Google Wave. I see lots of them are ‘false starts’. It is related to multiple situations when “collaborate” is a goal in products we are making. However, don’t forget – collaboration is just a tool to get results. So, to have it email like, maybe not a bad idea at all.

What is my conclusion? One of Google’s principles of “good enough” solution worked against Google with Wave. Email is good enough. There is no need for Wave. Despite the face, people hate email, I think, most of the people are feeling very comfortable with an email solution and new “sparkling” Google Wave innovation was only a new toy to play with. Users voted for proven old fashioned email to stay in their comfort zone. I think, there are some lessons learned to all PLM innovators in the “social collaboration” space. I will come with some of my thoughts about that later.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
11 December, 2009

I got a comment on my blog yesterday stating “back to basics”. Why do we discuss advanced stuff at the...

12 December, 2013

Identification. When it comes to data management it is a very important thing. In product data management and PLM it...

9 June, 2010

I had chance to read Solidsmack’s post about PTC new vision coming to us very soon- PTC Project Lightning. PTC...

10 January, 2021

In the last few weeks, I published articles to share with you the retrospective of PLM architecture – system, data,...

21 May, 2017

I learned yesterday that integration is ranked more important then security with end users in ongoing CIMdata cloud PLM survey....

23 January, 2022

Manufacturing companies are under pressure to deliver innovative products faster and at a lower price. At the same time, manufacturing...

18 March, 2014

How to integrated PLM and ERP? This is such an old topic. I’ve been discussing it on the blog so...

4 May, 2011

Microsoft Office plays a significant role in your engineering environment. Just think about the number of Excels you have to...

22 March, 2018

I was invited to speak at Develop3D Live 2018 about Data Management. If you followed my blog earlier, you might...

Blogroll

To the top