June 01, 2009, 11:09 AM — News sites are all atwitter (sorry) about Google's announced, by not yet available, Wave. What is Wave? Evidently it's hard to describe, as the Google announcement took about 90 minutes and spawned widely varying descriptions. But I know what this product is: another in a long line of “stuck to the screen” apps that try to turn knowledge workers into mouse potatoes. If you can't leave your screen, can you still do your job?
This is not about Wave, because we can't use it yet. If Google says Gmail is still in beta, Wave is pre-pre-pre-beta because outsiders can't get it. I don't like to talk about products you can't yet use, so let me talk about the trend of "stuck to the screen” applications.
Instant Messaging, followed by Twitter and now Facebook, are the headliners in a concerted effort by software developers to transform “wage slaves” of people stuck at work into “screen slaves.” When you're a screen slave, you can't be away from your screen to do anything, period. Customers, coworkers, and family don't matter unless they're on the screen in front of you.
App vendors write as if everyone's job is to sit and stare at their screen all day. If you're one of those workers, Wave will thrill you. If you wish Twitter could be more integrated into your document creation process, Wave will thrill you.
However, if you're one of the people who actually do real work for real people, such as customers, Wave probably won't help much. We won't know until we get our hands on it, of course, but Wave is designed for screen slaves.
If you still do hands-on work with customers, coworkers, and partners, then check out the “screen slave” quotient of all new applications. Does the application support your style of working, such as e-mail that waits for a response while you're away from your screen, or does it force you to interact immediately to provide value, like Instant Messaging? The problem comes when you work one way and your applications force you to work in a different way. Check carefully.
