Whit Andrews

I noted recently that Big Launches are No Man’s Friend. On the other hand, though, the next day I got a taste of why they still happen and developed a handy conspiracy theory to go with it.

So, I was talking to the folks at SimplyBox Tuesday. They briefed me and a colleague who write about the componentization of content, but what SimplyBox is about is snatching bits from Web sites and saving them so you can come back later. First vendor I knew that did this, kinda, was Documagix. That was 1996, and they were very very basic, but over the next few years the idea blew up — by 1999, there was a company called Octopus.com, and I knew some other people who never got much off the ground. Ultimately (by which I apparently mean penultimately) there was Clipmarks. And now SimplyBox.

SimplyBox has not had a big launch, of which I heartily approve. And yet, because Google Wave has had a big launch, SimplyBox — which started out explaining how email wasn’t good, and we can all agree with that — has to answer how it fits in with Wave. Hate Wave, work with Wave, differentiate from Wave — gotta talk about Wave. We all do. We can call it the “Wave vision.” We can call it the “Wave model.” We can say, “Have you read the Wave API?” (In which case, if you’re me, the answer is, “Do I look like I’m trying to dig out my brain with a grapefruit spoon? If not, you can assume I have not read an API yet today.”)

But, no matter what, because Google went Big with the Wave, they shut down the conversation. Just like Amazon shut down its competition with the affiliate program (”Hey! I can get an Ingram Book account and I’m a bookstore! Or I could be an Amazon affiliate…mmm…free money…donuts…[silence]), Google’s elegance of vision and apparently superior video (Sorry, was gonna watch it, but Ghost in the Shell 2 is still in the player) shuts down any competition.

Which makes one say — hey, wait a sec’. Google had 200 — I dunno, 100? a bunch — of developers working in Sydney for two years. (In Whit development years, that’s 5 hours of raw code. You want REM lines? That’s extra. Call for rates.) Why launch now?

Maybe they needed to shut somebody down. Constellation pushed early. Atcive Desktop shut it down. Maybe there’s another wave out there to combat Wave — something from Microsoft, or IBM, or…probably not, though. But if there was, and Google had seen it coming? CRASH. Ha-ha-ha-haaaah! WIPE-OUT!

The point is — sometimes a launch is just a launch. And sometimes it’s a pre-emptive strike.