Lars Rasmussen Interview – “We’re Talking to IBM About Project Vulcan”…and Much More

Google Wave co-founder, Mr. Lars Rasmussen gave a presentation and interview at TechFest 2010 in Bombay, India last week.

After his presentation he gave an interview to Only Gizmos where he talked about Google Wave, Google Maps and his move from entrepreneur to Google employee. It was a very interesting interview, is only about 6 mins long and worth watching in its entirety.

He comments regarding IBM’s Project Vulcan was very interesting. It sounded to me that they were taken a little by surprise by this product. Lars indicated they had talked with IBM, but not particularly about Project Vulcan. However, I agree with him that we do not need multiple protocols in this field. Thus, I hope that future talks between IBM’s Project Vulcan team and the Google Wave team will lead so some sort of agreement on a joint way forward that will allow the two to co-exist and interact.

I was happy to hear that working on making Google Wave more like email (i.e. have a Cc and Bcc functionality) is low on the list of priorities. Frankly, I hope they are working round the clock on nothing else but Google Apps integration.

Lastly, they have reported on Only Gizmos that during the speech Mr. Rasmussen announced that the Google Wave invites would soon come to an end and that they were looking to offer multi-language support in Google Wave. They say:

While most of the actual lecture didn’t quite reveal anything substantially new, he did let the audience know that Google was working on about 40 languages for Wave- and proceeded with a demo for the same. He also let slip that the Wave invite process would come to a halt in a few months- anyone can then sign up for Wave on the website.

However, the most important part, I think, is that they will be talking with IBM regarding Project Vulcan and how the two will be able to interface together. With IBM and Novell now firmly entrenched in this area the window for Google to carve out the enterprise footprint is rapidly closing. They are going to have to “WOW’ again with Google Apps integration. I think Novell and IBM will have clear business models and marketing strategy on their product going forward. I hope Google will also.

I have advocated for a long time here on this blog that the real benefit for Google Wave is in the workplace. I think the malaise you hear from the general population towards Google Wave only emphasis’ that assertion. It’s real power and the no-brainer problem that Google Wave solves is real-time workplace collaboration. Novell and IBM are presenting that…very effectively, I might add. Google is trying to define it as all things for all people. It may be…in the future. But, for now, concentrate on marketing it and developing it as a real-time workflow collaboration tool. That, in my mind, is the only market that will be profitable.

Now, I may be proven wrong. I hope I am. In fact, Google has a lot of really smart people working for them that probably have lots of great ideas on how this will make them a gazillion dollars down the line. But, the enterprise model for Google Wave is a no-brainer and if they get by-passed in this market it will be unforgivable.

As always, please share your thoughts on this post. What do you think of Project Vulcan? What do you think about no more invites?

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Tagged as: Business, Google, google docs, Google I/O 10, google wave, Google Wave Blog, google wave blogger, google wave gadgets, IBM, industry, Lars Rasmussen, Novell, Novell Pulse, Project Vulcan

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