SiliconBeat

You know that you are in trouble when the chief software architect of Microsoft, a company synonymous with bloated code, criticizes your product as too complicated.
Coming from Bill Gates, Microsoft’s retired chairman, that assessment of “Wave,” a new collaboration tool developed by Google engineers, Jan and Lars Rasmussen, may have sounded like sour grapes. After all, mass enthusiasm for Wave, which was unveiled last week, stole the thunder from the introduction of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine.
But the critic was Ray Ozzie, the soft-spoken, painstakeningly polite, universally admired developer of Lotus Notes and Groove. Ozzie began by earnestly praising the software developers who created Wave. “I have nothing but the most high degree of sincere respect for the people who took this on,” Ozzie said, and you could tell from the tone of his voice and the look on his face that he meant it.
Ozzie, after all is the guru of collaboration. It’s the topic his mind wanders to when it finds itself unoccupied, he told a crowd gathered for a Churchill Club event in Palo Alto on Thursday night. Ozzie said he continuously ponders how people can “more effectively connect” their brains so they can better work together. What he has seen of Wave, Ozzie added, he liked. “It’s nice,” he said.
But he cautioned that Web software needs to be simple. With Wave, “complexity is an issue.”
The remarks may have helped puncture some of the hype around Wave. A demo of the software last week at Google’s developer conference last week prompted a standing ovation. At its most basic, Wave ties e-mail together with instant messaging. But Wave doesn’t stop with a more diverse inbox, it seeks to reconceptualize online communication.
Wave is currently going through internal testing at Google and it is unclear when it will be available to the public. Though dubious that Wave will grow into a big success, Ozzie predicted the project would contribute to developing better Web-based tools. “We will learn a lot from their technology,” he said.