- Image by Shekhar_Sahu via Flickr
Recently Google announced that it’s next generation email/IM/collab tool would be scrapped (http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/wave-goodbye-to-google-wave/) just a year after a huge wave (see what I did there?) of PR and spin from the inventor of Google itself, Sergey Brin.
Just over a year later it has sunk. Usefully, Google are keeping the service alive for a while and have committed to open source some of the code but it raises an interesting question surrounding free software from the mighty. “If you don’t pay for the service then how can you have any comeback when it’s pulled?”.
Google famously offer us all a rich set of online applications for free and many use them in a commercial setting to run our businesses (we looked at Wave closely last year, like many others, and tested it in a live environment and whilst we didn’t adopt it as a tool we could have and I am sure many people did). So where does it leave businesses should the provider of the application decide they can’t be arced developing it any further?
It seems that risk assessment for free services just got a little trickier.
Me? I’ve always been more comfortable using paid-for applications and services that are not on the bleeding edge of early adoption and have multiple-vendor support.
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