Google University

Watching the Google Wave demo, I was struck by how perfectly it maps to the back-end platform we built at Sharpcast. No doubt one of the hardest parts of building Wave was the real-time, online/offline, concurrently editable synchronized datastore - the same technology that enabled SugarSync, Sharpcast Photos, and the dozen random apps hacked up by Sharpcast engineers. It makes me wonder what Sharpcast would look like today if we had focussed on creating an open platform, rather than focussing on product.

Yet spending three years building a platform with no revenue in sight is beyond the patience of most investors - it is what you'd expect in academia. Is academia a better environment than a VC funded startup for developing deep, disruptive technologies? Many big market successes - including Google - began in academia, without pressures of revenue or traffic growth. Google is often criticized for its failure to monetize nearly all of its products, save for AdWords and AdSense. Perhaps it is applying its academic roots to new initiatives, providing a nurturing environment for technologies to develop, and the common VC mentality that it's the size of the successes, not the number of failures, that matters.

Yet I wonder if a new product team at Google has the same hunger as a startup or a PhD candidate. Does a diet of ramen foster innovation in a way that the Google chefs do not? Technologies born in academia can take up to ten years from inception to commercial success, so if Google's projects are on the same trajectory, we'll just have to wait and see.