Many computer users hesitate to ride the Wave

Part of the reason is a reluctance to entrust important data to someone else's servers, even those of giant Google. But another factor is old-fashioned resistance to change.

"If I knew how long it will take for Google Wave to be adopted, I'd be a lot richer than I am," said Stuart DeVaan, CEO of Implex.net, a Minneapolis firm that provides IT outsourcing of services such as e-mail to 2,000 firms worldwide. "The user experience is the Holy Grail of computing, and once people are used to using something like e-mail it's hard to get them to use something different. Google will have to win people over by proving Wave offers a better user experience."

With Wave, people can exchange messages, share or edit documents, even play games in a computer desktop space that is shared by many people simultaneously. Google introduced it for testing by a select group of users in May, and in September opened up the testing -- by invitation only -- to about 100,000 people.

Wave immediately ran into a wave of skepticism.

"People have a reluctance to change," said Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. "E-mail is pretty simple, and people understand what it does. Maybe the consolidation of instant messaging and e-mail Google Wave represents makes sense, but it might be years before it happens."

"I kind of like Google Wave," said Bill Konkol, vice president of technology for Hopkins radio advertising firm Marketing Architects. "It saves running separate computer servers to do a lot of different things, such as live video meetings, instant messaging and e-mail. But are people willing to trust Google Wave as a replacement for e-mail? That's going to take years. After all, it's taken some time for people to adopt Gmail, Google's free e-mail."

Gmail, introduced in 2004, has only recently been adopted by local universities that plan to outsource student e-mail to Google in order to save money. The University of Minnesota, Macalester College and Hamline University have done so, and Macalester also put its faculty and staff on Gmail.