Will Google be beached by the Wave?

Sam Varghese
Friday, 05 June 2009 08:10

Opinion and Analysis

In Google's case, there has also been recognition of the fact that, much as we bleat about it, the human brain does not multitask. When it is forced to do so, tragedy often results.

But now, with Wave, Google has finally become, let's say, a bit greedy. And in the bid to grab more and more eyeballs and hold on to them, the company has chosen to mix things up.

Look at Gmail. It has retained the simplicity that Google practises. Gmail is a neat application, it does its snooping in a quiet manner, there are no flashing banner ads. The violation of your privacy is done in an almost apologetic manner.

With Wave, that discipline of keeping things simple has gone. Email, instant messaging, forums, blogs. wikis, business collaboration, you can do it all in one place. Something like the portals which have been on offer for a long time from the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft - yet the take-up has been much lower than that of the number who use the Google website.

With Google, less has always been more. (That's a joke in UNIX circles as there are two command-line utilities, less and more, which do virtually the same job, leading to the aphorism 'less is more' and vice versa.)

It's difficult to understand why Google has departed from a line of thinking that has proved to be very successful. But then one can always theorise.

The late Professor Peter Laurence, in his well-known work, The Peter Principle, postulated that people are always trying to move from a position of competence to one of incompetence. It is an inborn human trait, according to him, one that has led to the collapse of great civilisations.

Take the case of Adolf Hitler who conquered most of Europe but then reached his level of incompetence by invading Russia and coming up against the Russian winter. Things went steadily downhill for the Fuehrer from that point downwards.

Consider the case of Saddam Hussein. When he invaded Kuwait in 1990, he was arrogant enough to think that that was enough. Had he gone on and taken the eastern region of Saudi Arabia, thus taking control of 45 percent of the world's oil reserves at the time, nobody would have tried to fight him. They would have queued up to pay obeisance.

Laurence argued that if everyone is not in a position of incompetence, then it's simply because there aren't enough ranks in the hierarchy in their organisation. Those who have not reached their level of incompetence are the ones who do the useful work.

It looks like something similar is happening at Google. The company has been incredibly agile, and competent at what it has chosen to do. With Wave, it has overreached and may finally get beached.