It took me a while to figure it out, but now that I have digested the news Google dropped at Google I/O, earlier this week, I am convinced that we've all been given a glimpse of Google's Macintosh. Google Wave is billed as "Email if it were created today," but I think there's a lot more going on there.

Certainly, e-mail must die. It is an ancient and broken system. But Google's solution introduces a number of new ideas around the concepts of communications and the use of software to facilitate collaboration.

Certainly, collaborative text and document editing is a killer app. It's a great way to get distributed teams working together, and it's been slowly permeating into the collective consciousness over the past few years thanks to Etherpad and other similar sites.

But that's not the crux of what's cool here. I think the neat new special sauce is Google's approach to what it's calling robots. Instead of having oodles of widgets and application triggers, Google bundles up software in Wave as if it were people. If you want to send Mike a message, you drag his picture to the top of the message panel. If you want to have that message translated into French as you type, you drag the icon for the French translation bot into that same panel, and boom! It's as simple as that. Imagine if those Lotus Notes database actions your company creates no longer just sit there in a list window. No, to run a job on a database, you just e-mail it to someone and CC the functions in that e-mail.

That's not quite how it works in Wave, since the idea of CC'ing anything is foreign to this new Google world. We'll all be catching Waves in the future, and with the help of open-source implementations of the Wave server, along with the ability to code up darn near anything and present it as a robot, I'm pretty sure this is going to be a powerful new tool for businesses. In 10 years, I could see large companies abandoning client-side applications in favor of Wave Robots and headless servers.

Imagine a boss signing off on expense reports. Today, you e-mail the boss the reports, he changes some things, sends it back to the accountants, who fix it, then e-mail it back, creating three different versions of the spreadsheet. The Google Wave way to do it is to send the spreadsheet out to all invested parties, then wait while everyone edits the single copy online, in their browser. Throw in a robot called "The Button," and an approve button appears under the spreadsheet. When the boss clicks that button, REST requests are sent off to all of the payment systems that are needed to start the expense checks being cut.

It'll take a while, but I believe the robots concept is akin to the creation of the desktop paradigm for personal computing. It's easily understandable by someone who is not technical, and it embodies GUI practices that developers have been trying to get us all to standardize on for years.

Of course, now Google has to execute on this brilliant vision. I used Google Docs last night and was trying to share some files around with the apprentice group working on new content for the Web culture game, ForumWarz (NSFW), and let me tell you, Google Docs is NOT Google Wave. Sharing a document with 20 or so people is not easy, and I ended up having to fish through old e-mails to find a header that had everyone's e-mail addresses in it to copy/paste that into the Docs sharing window. Not exactly Wave-like.

Watch the keynote speech and decide for yourself if this is Google's Macintosh, or its PC Jr.