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.