Image: cc licensed flickr photo shared by bgilliard
I’m sick today and more grumpy than usual, so forgive the diatribe.
There’s no faster way to tune me out of an application demonstration than to couch it in slimy PR tactics. I literally made it 7.5 minutes into the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009 video before I just couldn’t stand anymore. I’m truly saddened by this, because by all accounts Google has an impressive offering in Wave that I’m still very interested in taking a look at when it finally launches.
The drawing together of previously disparate content sources and formats into a single, highly collaborative space that can be engaged in both synchronously and asynchronously using just a web browser and then embedded anywhere sounds like a great concept – but at this stage for most of us it is just that, an idea. This is what concerns me about certain characteristics of the tech sector – a sector I am a part of I should stress – the tendency to base judgments and value on flash, popularity or indeed bias rather than substance and merit. Not everyone does it of course, but one look at TechMeme right after the launch will show the extent to which this tendency occurs.
Already we’ve seen predictions that Wave will be the game changer, the LMS killer, the email killer; the one app to rule them all. All before most people on the planet have even laid a finger on the application. It is little wonder then that IT staff and educational technologists are so easily and frequently criticised for drinking the kool-aid and pushing tech for tech’s sake.
Base judgment and value on merit I say, not how well Steve Jobs or Google make the Next New Great Thing look in the pre-launch limelight.
For me the ultimate fate and impact of Google Wave remains to be seen. I for one have chosen to remain objective with a healthy degree of skepticism and withhold my ultimate value judgment until I’ve been able to actually use the application. If we as technologists are to be taken seriously by others, and our judgement trusted, we simply must be seen to base our recommendations on concrete evidence and experience.
