I only made it 25 minutes into the insanely long Google Wave demo video, which was long enough to see developer Lars Rasmussen do a jig but not quite long enough to see the Wave flex its muscles completely.

Beyond the ooh and ahh factor, how useful do you see this in an enterprise space? Your personal life? Do you really want people seeing you type in real time? One of our sister sites, SearchCIO.com is postulating that enterprises may be integrating the Google Wave into their own applications:

“People want a single place to collaborate on projects,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., who wrote a blog post (“Google Wave: Surfing The Future Of Collaboration“) with his take on where Google Wave is heading.

“Right now across corporations, they have spreadsheets, projects hosted on SharePoint, users have to jump from one application to another and partners or customers are given access to a VPN to collaborate,” he said. “That’s why one place to communicate, tying together Google Wave and Google Docs, makes sense.”

I spoke to one Masssachusetts-based analyst tonight who is among the envied few with an advance Google Wave account, so of course asked her what she thought. So, for everyone who feels bad they didn’t get the invite… apparently, Google Wave is not very fun if no one else you know is using it.

Sometimes when I”m talking to vendors, I sense that unified communications is whatever they can convince you to buy. “Here, install our IP PBX and you’ll be on the cutting edge of unified communications?”

Oh really? How about a presence engine? How about a desktop client that combines voice, video, messaging and everything else that I need to stay in touch with the members of my team who are scattered all over the country?”

Yesterday I was talking to Shane Yu, the head of Avaya’s unified communications consulting practice and one thing he said really stuck with me. A lot of IT organizations treat a UC initiative as a science project. They just buy a piece of it and put some users on it and see what happens. If that’s your approach, how do you measure success? Gee, people like it. It works. That will make you popular among the cubicles, but executives won’t be impressed when you bring that message into their offices. They want to know why the company needs to change the way it communicates.

This conversation dovetailed nicely with my plans for a new series that I’m writing for SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.  I’m calling the it simply “Success with Unified Communications.” Not particularly catchy, but it’s to the point. Each story in this series will look at a key step in a unified communications deployment and explore how to execute it. I’m going to look at everything, from vendor selection to design & build. I’ll explore how to assemble the right team to run your UC project and what management software you should have in place to deliver good quality of service and experience. I’ll also explore what you need to do in order to stay ahead of the curve and to make sure your UC deployment ages gracefully.

Part One of this series hit the wire today: The Technology Needs Assessment. I hope you find it helpful.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board of directors today, just a few days after the FCC opened an inquiry into why Apple rejected the Google Voice application from its iPhone App Store. Google Voice, based on the technology Google acquired with GrandCentral, is sort of a UC-on-the-cheap technology, as pointed out by our Click to Talk blogger, Tony Bradley.  At it’s core, Google Voice allows users to establish a single phone number which can be set to ring any number of devices – desk phones, mobile phones, home phones. It also has some unified messaging features, such as visual voice mail and online voice mail access, and it offers some other useful features, such as call recording, conference calling and directory assistance.

When Apple rejected the Google Voice application, many bloggers were upset. Some suspected that Apple was trying to protect AT&T from losing revenue, since Google Voice users can easily use the technology to move a phone call from their mobile device to a land-line. However, the picture is much more complicated than that.

As Dave Michaels pointed out on his blog, Pin Drop Soup, Apple and Google are now competitors. Although Google remains largely a Web-based software company and Apple remains mostly a hardware company, that distinction isn’t enough to keep this bromance alive. Michaels writes: “Well, maybe not a ‘primary’ competitor since Google doesn’t make hardware. But Google does make a browser, a cell phone platform, and an OS – direct alternatives to those made by Apple.”

Historically, Google and Apple have been relatively friendly toward, based on a mutual distrust of Microsoft. Schmidt’s presence on Apple’s board formalized that friendship. But now the companies’ interests are diverging. Google, which makes the bulk of its revenue in online advertising, wants a wireless Internet that is as open as its wired cousin is. Apple, like Microsoft and the majority of wireless service providers, want maintain a market where devices, operating systems, and carriers have a high degree of control over how wireless users access the Internet.

Apple and Google should have seen this split coming. After all, Microsoft is mostly a software company, too, and it has been Apple’s fiercest rival for decades.