Where have all the desktops gone?

So, as I write this, I’m fresh off my first experience with Google Wave.

For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, the tip of the iceberg is summed up by:

google_wave = (email + im + web) * ticket_system

The death of e-mail has been predicted for many, many years and it still hasn’t happened.  As antiquated as e-mail is, the format is a winner for its structure and it’s credibility. Everyone saves e-mails to cover themselves — the e-mail itself contains past conversations, a subject that can be followed, a clear list of multiple participants, important attachments, and a precise date & time.

The reality today is that new mediums of conversation have sprung up everywhere, and conversations are no longer limited to e-mail and phone calls, they now intertwine with instant messages and tweets, they relate to blog posts, videos, Flickr streams — the list is becoming endless.  But the conversations are disjointed, there’s no way to follow a conversation across mediums.  Several start-ups have attempted to highlight and address this issue, but the very nature of the Internet is changing faster than most can adapt.  Most, by the way, does not include Google.

Enter Google Wave.

While people have been bickering about what Open Source desktop they can “really” live with, and following the latest shenanigans in the commercial desktop war, Google has been busy doing the real work and has finally updated our decades old e-mail.

Wave has the potential to eventually include all current and future streams of communication and to relate them all through a single “live” wave.  And that will surely include VoIP (and converted-to-text VoIP conversations) and video conferences which will finally close the last of the original open loops.

I took a look today at what I run off my local desktop on a regular basis.  With the exception of my video editors, photography, and graphics software, everything else could be run online — and in fact most are used to communicate online anyways.

Gamers, photographers, and videographers will most likely continue to push the desktop market for some time to come, but we may see the less privacy-inclined disappear from the traditional desktop all-together in the near future.  If, or when, Google decides to attack the needs of the private cloud, the rest of us may go too.

Resistance, it would seem, is futile.