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Did Microsoft abuse its position of power so badly many people are still motivated by the experience? The way in which Google is releasing Wave almost makes me think so.

Unlike Microsoft, they've made it open-source and made it clear that anyone will be welcome to run it, even on their own servers and change it however they like.

Perhaps making money for Google is no longer their top priority, but here's guessing that there's a revenue stream in there somewhere.

What are Waves? While there's no simple answer, it's a combination of instant messaging and email with differences. The following are some I noted from the conference demo.

The idea is that they can be scattered around web pages around the web waiting for people to join in and make comments.

The messaging defaults to showing every character typed in real time, which is new, but will also place heavier loads on servers, perhaps a factor for self hosting.

The email will do a much better job of allowing reorganisations of threads or conversations as they are known in Gmail. While Outlook lists messages in the order they arrive, Gmail groups them by the subject line but doesn't allow re-grouping. Google Wave will remove these restrictions as well as allowing people to be added or dropped even from sub-threads within the conversation.

There will also be abbreviated interfaces that allow it to work on iPhone and Android.

Years ago, when Google only had its search engine, I read an article somewhere saying that Google is preparing for World Domination. Probably the basis of the following website: GoogleWorldDomination.com. I asked my colleagues  then how in the world would a search engine company dominate the world?

With Google's latest and probably greatest product - Google Wave - I think I've got my answer.

Google Wave consolidates the most important internet communication technologies into one simple interface. You can do everything from simple messaging to complex simultaneous wiki-type editing.

But what amazed me was the playback feature where you can playback how a “wave” transpired. It’s like having a remote control on your threaded email conversation.

Another feature that I liked is that when you make a change or reply to a wave, the changes are sent real-time character by character to the server, then to other wave clients.

With a complex protocol to enable a lot of features, I wonder how “real time” it will be in real life setup - server on a datacenter and clients on a regular DSL internet connection?

One true step for Google in World (maybe Web would be a better word) Domination is making Google Wave open source. That means anyone can download the software and upload it to their server.

If Google Wave becomes successful, then Google will be living inside the majority of the world’s servers.

Another exciting feature of Google Wave is the ability to create extensions on both client and server side. This allows web development companies (like KayWeb) to create customised versions of Google Wave and onsell it to clients.

In future, we at KayWeb will most likely be doing this sort of Google Wave customisations!

What kind of customisation? We cannot reveal. We can confirm that a trademark is already pending for our desired products.

Unrelated to what we will do, we would like someone to create a Skype extension for Google Wave to allow for Voice and/or Video calls.

My fearless forecast is that one day, email will be a thing of the past and wave dominate us all.

I can see my Managing Director Haig Kayserian asking me to 'wave him an update' or 'start a wave to discuss KayWeb's next brilliant business idea!

Last week, Google surprised the I/O conference crowd with their announcement of its very own communication and collaboration tool with an almost-perfect application that achieved the company's goal to 'wow' everyone.

And wow it did as the impressive engineers employed by Google presented the beauty of the newly-developed Google Wave; the technology that is best described as e-mail for the 21st Century. How?

Google Wave is a collaboration of all available internet communication.

Communication including email, instant messaging, blogging, sharing of files, tasks, etc. The Google Wave is where people can work on shared files, enabling a participant to reply anywhere within the message, edit the content and add further participants at any point during the process. Then with 'playback', an absent participant is able to rewind the wave to see who said what and when. And this is all in real time!

Best of all, Google Wave is 'open source'. Every enthusiastic developer can contribute to develop extensions which will continue to improve the tool.