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Google Kills Wave

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Re: Google Kills Wave

#191

Post by mechanical_fish »

nl wrote: post #141
amackera wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver. It's pure conjecture of course!

It wasn't so much that they lacked infrastructure as that the early versions didn't scale so well. I got a very early invitation, and it was pretty slow, and got worse as they added more users. They fixed that of course, but it did slow down the roll-out.

So why not have another rollout? Sponsor some contests? Hold more demos in tech conferences? Build a Wave-to-Twitter gateway? Build a demo site which gives every HN article it's own wavelet, or whatever?

Re: Google Kills Wave

#192

Post by alanh »

thorax wrote: post #46
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…

We use it exclusively for our meeting status reports, etc. It's just a wicked solid tool for meetings and out-of-band document collaboration. I'd love to see it continue. I'm sad it didn't get the adoption they wanted, but I also wonder what they expected when they didn't even really try to integrate it with GMail. If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have bette…

The announcement leaves open the possibility that the live collaboration and/or wiki functionality could end up in Gmail soon enough anyway: “We … will … extend [Wave] technology for use in other Google projects.”

Re: Google Kills Wave

#193

Post by mechanical_fish »

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.

Can money replace seeing your vision for realtime collaboration die twice?

There is another way of looking at this. Let me rephrase that for you:

Isn't it nice that Google gave us all that money in order to let us try our idea a second time? Just look at all the lessons we learned in preparation for the third time. Google may even open-source all our work so we can take it with us.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#194

Post by ary »

ary wrote: post #23

That was fast. I remember watching the announcement (in person) and wondering who it was really meant for. At the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem. What I did really like was the work they'd done on change-set propagation. Don't have a link to the session on hand, but it was quite interesting.

And here it is:

http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnd...

Re: Google Kills Wave

#195

Post by watmough »

thegyppo wrote: post #181
orangecat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have better success for it. No question. Wave should have been an alternate view of your Gmail account. Instead it was a completely distinct environment that you had to manage separately, which most people aren't going to be bothered to do.

The main reason I didn't like it is a very simple one, and it has to do with automatic sign-in to Google properties based on whether you're logged into Analytics or Gmail or the like. Since we use a corporate email for Analytics but personal ones for Wave it meant having to switch logins all the time. Might sound trivial but actually put me off using the product at all.

Ironically, Google just enabled multiple sign-ons, but I'm not sure it would have helped.

There's too much tied to my GMail account already.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#196

Post by elblanco »

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…

It's didn't help that google's response to user feedback was "you just don't understand it" rather than improving the product.

I mean, we still have to contend with a broken, nonstandard, useless scrollbar in the product.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#197

Post by robertmarkbram »

This is very sad. I thought it was a great product but suffered from lack of good marketing AND positioning (as in it wasn't good enough to do what Google wanted it to, and it was never marketed adequately to fill a niche). In particular: - It isn't a good replacement for email because there is no integration with gmail or other established mail systems. - It isn't good enough for creating documents (blogs, company documents) because there was no security (ability to make something read-only to certain people). - It isn't good enough as a collaboration tool because after a few people edit a Wave, it looks so confusing - you lose all notion of it being a single consistent document because it looks too much like a complicated chat.

I also wonder if it was just too heavy in terms of Javascript and network processing.

Either way, this is a big shame - I was very much looking forward to Wave taking a greater part in my tech life.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#198

Post by kmilden »

Google needs to focus on their core competency which is search. Instead of competing with everyone they should find ways to integrate their search engine into everything. It boggles my mind we don't integrate Google search into everything like we do with the Twitter API. If they continually strive for second place in every category they may one day find themselves second in search as well. Wave is just another lesson in the long string of failures they will continue to produced until they get back to what made them great in the first place.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#199

Post by betterlabs »

I don't think Wave as a product failed. I think it failed as a product Google imagined/wanted it to be. They expected Wave to replace the way we use email. I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now, after the fact. The tech was cool and useful but changing consumers habits and especially on something like communication is very very hard. So I am not really surprised it did not get adoption. I agree with some of the comments below that if it was integrated tightly within Gmail, it would worked better and PERHAPS it would helped more users try it, like it and adopt it ..slowly.
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