NewWave is a discontinued object-oriented graphical desktop environment and office productivity tool for PCs running early versions of Microsoft Windows (beginning with 2.0).

HP encouraged independent software vendors to produce versions of applications which took advantage of NewWave functionality, allowing their data to be handled as objects instead of files.

"[1] HP incorporated NewWave into their multi-platform office automation offerings running under their proprietary MPE and HP-UX (UNIX) minicomputer operating systems.

[5] In its original November 1987 press release Hewlett-Packard described NewWave as “an application environment designed to provide personal computer users with a single method to access data and files from multiple sources on a company’s network”.

It was developed by HP’s Personal Software Division (PSD) in Santa Clara, California, United States, as part of their distributed computing environment strategy,[1] after three years of work by more than 100 employees.

[1] Key features of NewWave included: HP described the OMF as a means of binding applications and data together to form “objects”, such as compound documents.

Recorded tasks generated a BASIC-like source-code, which could be repeated unmodified, or edited and expanded to create sophisticated automated and interactive activities.

While praising HP's "serious, sincere effort" to give Windows "a complete, object-oriented" GUI, Stewart Alsop II in 1988 doubted that other software developers would create software for NewWave because HP "is not considered a standard setter", IBM and Microsoft had their own desktop-metaphor plans, and existing applications needed "a substantial redesign and rewrite" to effectively use it.