I was excited by the original video clip that introduced Wave. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I couldn’t wait to get an invite. Once I got one, my reaction was… “Huh? Now what?” Like most people who tried it, I never really got into it. I felt kind of guilty, since I never really devoted that much time to figuring it out. I thought I would have plenty of time to do so once the kinks were worked out. But alas. After about a year, Google announced that they will put no more development effort into it, essentially dooming it as a product.

Google certainly has the right to kill off its projects. It was still in Google Labs (not even Beta), and no one had paid for it. But the way that Google did this is unsettling. If I had spent a lot of time or money incorporating Wave into how I work, I would feel pretty bad after someone pointed out that blog post to me. Just imagine: you have to follow a specific blog page to find out that the product you have built a business around, or used every day is doomed. . If I were a partner who had spent money developing products around Wave, I  would feel even worse. Let down. Adrift. Angry. Certainly, I would think twice about doing business around Google technologies again. Actually, I wouldn’t think twice; I would never do it again.

I love how startups innovate. That means taking risks, which is to be applauded. But when do they stop being startups and when do the risks need to get smaller? I think that we have reached that point with Google now. It wants to be an enterprise player, so it needs to act like one. That means developing and communicating long term technology roadmaps that developers and enterprises can count on. Some think that this kind of flexibility and willingness to act quickly is a good thing. So do I, for small startups. Not for high profile products from grown-up companies. Google was still pushing Wave to enterprises at an event about two months ago. Even today, there is nothing on the Wave inbox page or the Wave help page or the official Wave blog page to indicate it is a dead product walking. Partners and customers are right to expect more. Google has made significant progress towards becoming a more credible technology partner and enterprise supplier. This episode is certainly a step backwards, however.

While the focus was supposed to be on the European tech scene, it often felt like a gathering transplanted tree and branch from San Francisco. The inside jokes, the focus on venture capital gossip, even the music felt very Californian. The smug, “we’re masters of the Tech universe” attitude was sometimes a bit hard to take.

Given Lemeur’s bi-continental focus (a Frenchman living in the Bay Area) and the influence that the US has on the tech industry worldwide that’s to be expected somewhat. However, I wasn’t sure why some of the companies presenting there, even in the startup competition were even there since they had no discernible European connection.

The main hall speakers were generally well chosen, even if some could probably develop a new story. I am not a habitué of these conferences, but I had heard several of these messages before. It was very clear that some of the speakers who had achieved great things had real ideas they were passionate about,which lead directly to their success. Others just seemed to have a reasonably good idea once, and were lucky enough to be where lightning hit, judging by what they had to say here.

Some speakers clearly understood what people were coming to the event for. Ryan Sarver from Twitter made several important announcements about new service offerings. Others, like Ethan Beard from Facebook  read from a prepared speech that told the audience basically what Facebook is and why it was so great, definitely not what anyone in the room needed to hear.

I tried to talk to or hear as many startups as I could, either on the show floor or in the competition. There seemed to be four main themes among the new companies’ products.

• Helping people organize their web experience and online resources (Mendeley, Symbaloo, Wikio, Allmyapps)
• Cloud support services (Superfeedr, Joilcloud, Cloudsplit
• Using the social grid in different ways (Kukunu, Friendbinder, Stribe the competition winner)
• Ecommerce (Shutl, Storific, Sokoz)

The star of the event was Queen Rania of Jordan, who gave an impassioned and clued in speech on how the Web can be used to improve how people live and calling on the entrepreneurs to support her main charity programme.

I decided earlier this year that this would be an interesting venue to explore. It is a European technology conference which focuses on startups. Bigger players like Google, BT, Orange, Facebook and Microsoft are here too, but to emphasize their connections with new technology. Most of my Gartner customers are bigger, more conservative enterprises that are interested in startups, but hesitate to go too far with them. I spend a lot of time taking about SharePoint and other mainstream products, but will be looking for ideas out of the mainstream and for what comes next.

I am especially interested in what is coming out of Europe, where I live. It’s easy to find startups in the Bay Area, but I know that there is great stuff coming from the rest of the world.

Anyone here who has ideas about what is coming next from Europe can DM me at @jeffmann on Twitter. I will be writing later about the things I see.

I never really bought into the idea that Twitter would eventually have to start taking advertising or charge users directly. Charging individual users would certainly drive many people away, this hoax announcement notwithstanding. Unless done extremely carefully, so would advertising in the way most web sites do it. More people access Twitter using third party client software like Twhirl or Tweetdeck than go to the Twitter.com site anyway, so conventional advertising potential is limited.

Twitter must avoid doing anything that could reduce the number of people who use it or how often they tweet. Twitter’s real value is in the volume. Millions of people make around 6 million tweets per day, by one count, turning Twitter into a world-wide, real time twitching, tweeting sensing system. If you want to know what people are saying about your product, your candidate, your television show or your research report, then Twitter is the place to look. Companies would be willing to pay much more for better access to this content than a more functional client or some ads. There is much more value to be made by analyzing and feeding real time feedback. Twitter has already experimented with this model by working with the Current cable television channel to feed real time election Tweets during the US presidential election. They could easily take this much further. I think this is the kind of thing that Biz Stone is talking about when talks about opportunities in providing better services to businesses.

Insight and Exchange Adapter provide basic access to data in databases/web services and applications through Biztalk respectively. Their Exchange Appliance Connector extends the Google Search Appliance into the Exchange data stores, so that users can search through their messages, contacts and calendar entries using the Google interface.

These three products are aimed at enterprises. Kayxo also used their Insight product to build a consumer-oriented product with enterprise possibilities called Kigoo, which manages Google Calendars through the Outlook calendar user interface. It costs $10 / year.

None of these products are going to change the world, but they do scratch various itches that I have heard customers describing. It reflects a split I commonly see among many organizations. Some say that workers spend too much time in their email clients and are looking for ways to coax them to use other tools like wikis, portals and social software platforms, lessening the fixation on email. Others figure that since so many people spend most of their days in Outlook anyway, that is the place to go to expose additional useful data. Kayxo certainly supports the latter strategy.

I am not ready to throw up my hands and declare Outlook the universal inbox to everything, just yet. I think that reducing the time spent there is generally a Good Thing. At least, I certainly want to reduce the time I spend in it. However, I certainly see the value in exposing targeted information in that context when it makes sense.

What do you think? Do we spend too much time in email clients or not enough?

But the gloomy financial situation made me worried about the fate of many of these small companies. Everyday brings reports of cutbacks or worse at some of the cool little companies I follow. How would these little guys survive when corporate budgets really began to get tight?

As I rounded a corner to a field at the top of the hill, a cheesy show tune entered my head unbidden, with slightly different text: Somewhere… Under the Radar… Life Goes On… This might be the model for at least muddling through, if not thriving. While it will be harder for strategic projects based on big ticket, infrastructure-oriented vendors to get off the ground, it could be easier for little tactical implementations to slip through, if people in the business can see enough value to justify what they put on their credit card. Many vendors try to move as quickly as they can to enterprise-wide deployments, naturally enough. But in the current economic climate, I expect to see a lot more vendors aiming to stay low and under the radar, at radically lower price points supported by radically lower costs of operations. With CFOs looking for big numbers to cut, this isn’t a bad place to be necessarily.

It won’t be comfortable, of course. Tactical projects become targets for consolidation and architectural harmonization. Silos of content and other data remain an intractable problem. Going low for enterprise vendors means they inevitably become someone’s target to eradicate. They need to keep innovating with great products and great service just to defend their position.

Still, it’s better to have a position to defend, even a small one. Small vendors going for enterprise projects will find inhospitable reactions over the next couple years. Aiming low and surviving will provide better chances.