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Google Kills Wave

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Re: Google Kills Wave

#151

Post by mattmcknight »

jaybobzin wrote: post #91
alextgordon wrote: post #42

It failed because it was completely invisible. Facebook spams your inbox. They make sure you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc). With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out now . What kind of a commun…

The sad thing here is that Google did the polite thing, and turned off email notifications by default. It actually took some searching to figure out how to turn it on. Contrast this with Buzz, where they dropped it right in the middle of your inbox. Quite the opposite strategy. I suppose the solution I favor is to ask the user if they want notifications when they sign up. Or at the very least making it very obvious h…

The polite thing to me is keeping it all in one place so I don't have to go multiple places looking for updates.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#152

Post by mhd »

So, that leaves us with 0 popular GWT applications? Or did Google build anything new / ported something old with it?

Re: Google Kills Wave

#153

Post by SkyMarshal »

zavulon wrote: post #29

Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that. I really hope Buzz is next.

I think they're killing it too quickly. It's not like it was a resounding failure.

Those who have adapted it and taken the time to really learn and use it swear by it, which strongly implies there is opportunity for it. It's not so much a product failure as a launch or marketing failure.

Pandora.com, for example, had similar problems getting initial traction, but stuck it out long enough to get over the hump (thanks in large part to iOS and Android), and are now one of the hot 'new' things.

Sometimes I think you can kill promising products too quickly in an attempt to stick with 'fail early/fail often'.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#154

Post by mkramlich »

frossie wrote: post #134
mkramlich wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complement of Release Early/Often is probably Kill Early/Often. EDIT: spelling fixed, thanks!

You know what the complement of Kill Early/Often is? It's me never letting my shop use a new Google product ever again. People invest time in adopting these technologies. Sure, with a little startup you take into account the fact that they might not be able to survive, but with Google you think hey, okay, let's use this thing. And you start developing your process around it. And then you get burned when it gets dropp…

The risk of that happening was obvious to me and probably others as well. Heck, whenever you have a dependency on some external service there's a risk that service or provider could go away. Provide the service yourself, or scratch that itch another way, and you'll be immune to that risk. They didn't force you to use Wave, and in fact they were nice enough to let you use it for free, so I don't see what grounds you have to complain about it going away.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#156

Post by easyfrag »

tc wrote: post #12

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook? Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email. Maybe Google just hoped W…

I totally agree and would add SharePoint as a potential victim. Maybe Google was the only company that could invent Wave but it was definitely the wrong company to market and sell it.

Not sure if the pieces of wave that are open-source are enough to build a product but there is definitely a real email problem inside corporations that Wave seems to have potential to solve. Google has very limited interest in products for intranets, their focus is the wider Internet.

The point I'm trying to make to this startup community is that there's money to made solving the corporate email problem. And the second mouse gets the cheese.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#157

Post by [deleted] »

callahad wrote: post #106
pgbovine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave somehow i don't think they need your sympathies ... they probably got a decent amount of money from their acquisition, so they're probably not crying right now ;)

Can money replace seeing your vision for realtime collaboration die twice? I'm sure they're not hurting, but if they were building the technology because they believed it could transform the way we interact with each other for the better... Well, that still has to sting.

[deleted]

Re: Google Kills Wave

#158

Post by lwhi »

Wave was a bit too sci-fi. A bit too ahead of its time maybe. Maybe it's best if the technology is split up and spoon-fed to the general population ... that way people can get a taste. I think change needs to be incremental.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#159

Post by fuzz579 »

tc wrote: post #12

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook? Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email. Maybe Google just hoped W…

I suspect that now that Google is trying to compete directly with Facebook, they looked at wave and saw that it wasn't going to be adapted by many non-corporate users, so they reallocated the resources to something that would be.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#160

Post by abraham »

swombat wrote: post #146
dpcan wrote: post #51

Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did. So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers. I would blame the launch f…

Completely agree. Whoever planned the launch strategy for Wave should be flogged. Wave had huge potential. I can't believe Google are so short-sighted as to let it go so quickly, with so little effort.

Flogging people for having trouble scaling at Google's size is not nice.
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