Week 4: Collaboration (Continued)

1. The Google Wave demonstration shows the power of collaboration. Google released the Wave project in an unfinished format. Why? What do they want to happen?

Google released the wave project in an unfinished format to get outside help from developer to develop wave through collaboration with outside developers. They want other outside companies and developers to look at the wave project and develop it further to make a better finished product. This is very unusual for such a large company to release an unfinished product into the world, only other large company to do this is Microsoft who usually release unfinished windows software and then do multiple updates later on. This can sometimes back fire as sometimes people would refuse to use a product which is unfinished.

2. When a product is in this state what do developers usually do?

When the product is in this state we watch in the video the developers make sure they launch the product and collaborate with people and ask for their cooperation.

3. Google has a different business model form, for example, Apple. Explain how that model is different and what assumptions it has.

Apple business model provides a small share market with superior products. Apple’s business model is famous for their innovations, beautifully designed and expensive products. Apple is the world leader in both quality and functionality.

In another hand, Google has a completely different business model then Apple. Its strategy is based on free web tools, and it´s revenue comes from advertising on those free tools. Most of Google products are open source, where anyone could collaborate with it.

4. Make a list of THREE products/tools you can think of that have relied on collaboration and are distributed free. How does that work? Why does it work?

A very good example would be Google, that have use collaboration process efficiently, which include ranges of Google applications from Gmail, Google calendar, Google docs, and this new I found out today which was Google wave and other web applications which they have implemented. All these applications I have named they work collaboratively even though it’s under the same company but they are been built by different people but for an example it’s possible to edit various types of documents in Gmail.

There are benefits in collaboration of products or tools such as the example which I have made includes shared views, shared space, shared ideas.
Another example of collaboration product development is Hewlett Packard Product and Process Development which are the HP’s product line division, both parties share the maximum information to cut R&D expenses and IT expenses.
The third example is collaboration on the enhanced product realization project which includes the consortium of vendors and users that is the company that manufactures caterpillar collaborating with TI.
I can also pick out another situation of collaboration is Microsoft they have made it possible for different applications such as Word, Excel, Visio, PDF. It has been made possible for users to share documents between these applications it allow the user to edit various packages at the same time. Also an application which SharePoint Web technology based server that can be used to build portals, collaboration sites, and also content management sites. It is very versatile in a number of features and support various enterprise and Web scenarios. It is also popular for document management solutions. In all my findings I have come to realise that collaboration in product development is very good with few point which I have made.