Over on The Steve Rubel Lifestream, Steve says Google Wave is about as likely to succeed as RSS.  Translate that.  He declares Wave DOA…for now.

It was the reasoning Steve used to make his declaration that caught my attention:

I have had a Google Wave sandbox account since late July. It’s slick to be sure. However, what I keep asking myself is this: what problem does it solve?

Readers of Domino or this blog have been in plenty of conversations about the role the problem to be solved plays in driving financial performance in any organization.  Every customer experience starts with a person who has a need, problem or desire they would pay money to have solved.  Whether or not – or how well – it gets solved is every customer’s ultimate measure of the success of the experience.  Every organization’s financial performance is determined by the same thing.

So when Steve declares he’s not sure what problem Google Wave solves, I sat up straight.  Remember the old adage “How will you know when you get there if you don’t know where you’re going?”  Well, if Google Wave doesn’t solve a real problem for real people…it could indeed be DOA.

Google says Wave will let us communicate and collaborate in real time. Steve’s not buying it – yet.

I haven’t used Google Wave yet.  I haven’t been invited.  As in many tech innovations, only some get to experience the more conceptual, buggy, and unpolished version.  That made me wonder if Google is using this controlled, by-invitation-only phase to discover the problem Wave will solve.  If so, that’s an interesting – and expensive – development strategy.  I’m more of an “end in mind” girl myself.  With clients, and in past lives leading product development groups, I always found that defining the target customer and their need first – then developing to suit – paid off better than the other way around.

Apparently not cool enough or geeky enough to have won an invitation to try Wave, I’m anxious to see what unfolds next.  Will we all join Steve in asking “yeah, but what problem does it solve?”

Related links:

Gina Trapani on HarvardBusiness.org: Google Wave Attempts to Modernize Email

Mark Hurst on GoodExperience.com: Google Wave doesn’t stop information overload

Daniel Lyons on Newsweek’s Techtonic Shifts blog: Google Wave. Huh. What Is It Good For?