Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.
Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google's VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wave lands in the middle of a deliberate Google week: at I/O, Vic Gundotra framed the company's bet on HTML5 as the web's next standard, and days earlier reporting surfaced that Gmail — still wearing its beta label five years after launch despite 146 million worldwide users per Comscore — might drop it to compete for enterprise customers. Wave is the product expression of both threads: a communication surface rebuilt for a richer web, pitched by O'Reilly Radar's framing as what email would look like if invented today.
The rollout traveled unusually fast for a keynote demo — same-day writeups from Webware, an exclusive video interview with the Wave founders on TechCrunch, and Google's own 'Went Walkabout' post — signaling Google wants developer mindshare around Wave as a platform, not just a consumer app.
First-order effects
- Developers attending I/O get a new real-time communication platform with an API to build against, making Wave adoption among third-party builders the immediate test of Gundotra's HTML5 pitch.
- Email and instant messaging incumbents now have a live demonstration that conversation, documents, and media can share one streaming interface rather than separate clients.
Second-order effects
- The rumored move to strip Gmail's beta label becomes more consequential: if Google positions Wave alongside its Apps properties, enterprise buyers will judge whether Google's communication stack is production-grade or perpetually experimental.
- Browser vendors face added pressure to accelerate HTML5 support, since Wave's real-time features only run well on browsers implementing the new standard — turning Google's showcase into de facto compliance testing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, communication tools consolidate from discrete protocols (email, IM, document sharing) into unified web-native platforms owned by whoever controls the browser and the data center.
- A web defined by HTML5 application runtimes rather than pages shifts competitive gravity toward companies like Google that operate at both layers — standards influence plus hosting infrastructure — inviting closer regulatory attention over time.
The trend: The web is shifting from a document medium toward a real-time application runtime, with Google using flagship demos like Wave to pull browser makers and developers onto HTML5.