211–220 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Docs seems to support a very Etherpad-like interface, but it's a little too bloated for what I used to use Etherpad for.
A while ago Google Docs even switched to using Etherpad-style operational transformation instead of diff-match-patch. Some pretty mind-bending technology here: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi...
It was the anti-suckless - overengineered, XML and web-based, anti-privacy, pampering users instead of educating them (e.g. in a corporate environment, using a VCS together with IRC is a much better way to exchange information). I would've expected at least one contrary voice somewhere :)
I say good riddance.
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…
My guess is there is an up coming project (Google Me?) that shares some similarity with Wave but is targeting the friends&family group rather than workgroup. They probably will not outsource Wave as some of its tech will find its way to this upcoming project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Aren't these two sentences contradictory? 'Wave is a great product if you changed the interface, integration points and, really, if it was a different product'. I think there's a tendency to over-analyze the reasons Wave was not a success…
I'm no mutant (and certainly not a a merry one), but I got a lot of use out of it. And I certainly didn't invest a lot of time into "figuring it out", I just used it in the simplest way I could, which is create new waves, talk to people on them, and that's it. This proves, imo, that it wasn't a failure of product, but of marketing. Most people opened Wave and had no idea what to expect and no idea what to do with it,…
The fact that you personally found it useful doesn't, in itself, prove that it was a failure of marketing although, presumably, it proves you found it useful.
I know I didn't just look at it and close the window, completely not understanding what it was about. I understand what it is about, I just think it's bad. It has a dreadful UI and massive overlaying of concepts and features without much coherence. Just as an example, one superficial but reasonably accurate sign of clunky, ill-thought-out design is the presence of made-up terminology - wave has this in spades, what with the waves and the wavelets and the blips. These are fundamental usability problems - they can't be fixed by marketing.
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…
Yes, a thousand times yes. If Google did the last 10% o the work:
* Sell a pre-packaged, serviced VM (in VMware, HyperV, and Xen formats)
* Made an Outlook plugin for wave
They would have a real 'embrace and extend' on their hands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree. We use Wave for all kinds of communication in our startup, and it's just an amazing tool for small workgroup communications and document drafting. I'm actually rather peeved it's going away, because (1) I don't want to waste a bunch of time trying to migrate data out of Wave, and (2) there really isn't much out there that can replace Wave in our workflow. We use Wave as a GUI-editable wiki where documents gr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have added a small but visible "new blip" icon to Gmail. That would have gone a long way, and nobody would have complained about spamming.
I bet the Wave and GMail teams have some animosity between them, and neither wants to help the other, even though officially they're "playing for the same team".
Ex-Googler Piaw Na has an interesting post about this: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers....
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…