I just read an interesting post by Irwin Lazar speculating about why Google purchased DocVerse. His take is that they want to use the DocVerse technology to get Google Wave into Office Documents.

I am not sure that is the reason they did it, but to me it sounds like a brilliant idea. Here at ActionBase we have been long time advocates of active documents (ActionDocs) that are not just passive objects in a process – but actually drive the process forward (for example have the checklist drive the process it describes) – and then have the process feedback into the document (e.g. checklist) on how a specific instance of the process is actually progressing.

If Google uses DocVerse to do this with Office and Wave – I think they will have made real progress in making Google Wave a real alternative to process oriented email in business, effectively making it an Adaptive Case Management system (and under the covers have Google be the  cloud based process warehouse and an alternative to SharePoint).