Google Wave didn't fall, it inspired me and many more for ambitious thinking. Its tech was adopted by other products. It changed something intangible and inherent to tech.
Retiring Wave
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: Retiring Wave
#62Will never forget the launch event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
This was an excellent launch. I watched live and was enthralled.
Re: Retiring Wave
#63Google Wave was really the spark that inspired me to "build a startup." With that said, it was a mess. It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. It had "everything" in the worst of ways. It really was a Frankenstein; I distinctly remember threaded conversations that wouldn't collapse, weird and inconsistent results when contributing to the same "…
Google Wave could have been a killer product, but for a key mistake that is a bat light for failure — it was positioned as a replacement for email. Email is the ultimate killer app and ultimate whipping boy.
The “key mistake” was that all of the technical parts were poorly architected and horribly buggy, and then they tried to scale up the user base using a massive amount of marketing hype before their product or infrastructure could handle the load. As a result all the hyped-up customers were confronted by a terrible user experience, felt burned, and left. Without a completely different technical implementation from top to bottom it was bound to fail irrespective of how their marketing team “positioned” it.
The UI was a GWT app written in Java and compiled to JavaScript which suffered from inexplicable UI hangs and all kinds of weird bugs in every corner case (it would e.g. get stuck in states requiring a page reload to fix).
The “communication protocol” was opaque binary blobs of GWT stuff wrapped up in Jabber/XMPP (XML) but without really using most Jabber features. Basically not a designed protocol at all, just the most ad-hoc thing slapped together overnight, with XMPP used as marketing (because that’s “open”).
The server was some closed source thing only hosted by Google.
The original marketing claim was that this was all “open” and “federated” but it was not possible to run a third-party server, and it was not possible to implement a different front-end since the whole thing was coupled tightly to the GWT front end they had.
The big innovation was supposed to be that some fancy “operational transformation” magic would merge different users’ diffs so that everything could be edited collaboratively in real time without conflicts and with minimal bandwidth, but in practice what that meant was they just sent the full content of every message on every keystroke (where “full content” here includes a massive amount of protocol overhead wrapping the messages) – maybe the fancy diff research stuff was intended for some future update that never made it.
The front end really started falling apart horribly (slowing down to the point of being unusable) under any kind of larger group, because it hadn’t been architected to keep up with the load. From what I remember it mostly worked with about 2–10 people communicating in a group, and became entirely unusable with 50+ in a group.
Disclaimer: I was never a Wave expert, just some guy who tried to read their docs and play with their technology and ended up laughing and sadly shaking my head all the way through, and it’s been a decade now. Some of my recollection could be slightly off.
Re: Retiring Wave
#64I remember the headlines about Google reinventing email with Wave, the world without emails.. I guess it will never die, long live the emails :p.
For the below-25 crowd email is quite dead : they only read it when asked via proper chat or “social” channels, and send one as last resort. For the older gen email is near dead due to spam. In few years it will be new telefax.
Re: Retiring Wave
#65While the Apache Foundation hosts a lot of great projects, it also looks to me like a place where big projects go to die. I'm thinking of the whole Apache Open-Office fiasco, among other things. Looking at their list of projects sorted by number of committers[0], event at the top I don't get the idea that most of those have a lot of momentum. Do I just have a completely wrong impression? I'm curious if there's someth…
> Do I just have a completely wrong impression? You have a completely wrong impression. Projects in the wild die all the time, and the process is not necessarily neat and tidy. At the ASF, projects must be actively retired, and there are a sequence of actions which must be taken to move the project into the "Attic". Retirement gives all stakeholders a defined close of business. All software projects have a life cycle…
And this, of course, leads to selection bias.
You hear more about the ASF retiring projects because the ASF has a whole process around it that's publicized.
You don't hear too much about some one-man project that stops updating its GitHub all of a sudden. You hear about ASF projects dying becuase the ASF wants people to hear about it.
Re: Retiring Wave
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. In other words, it was Lotus Notes 2.0. One of these days, someone's gotta make a Lotus Notes 3.0 that actually makes good on the original premise, without screwing it up by adding too much other stuff (like Lotus+IBM did) or by forgetting what the problem being solved is (like Google did.) The original…
Wave was federated/vendor-neutral/client-synced. The federation protocol is described in http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/hello-world-meet-goog... Syncing is described in https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/wave/whitepapers/... It was also every bit as buggy and confusing as Lotus Notes.
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Re: Retiring Wave
#67I remember the headlines about Google reinventing email with Wave, the world without emails.. I guess it will never die, long live the emails :p.
For the below-25 crowd email is quite dead : they only read it when asked via proper chat or “social” channels, and send one as last resort. For the older gen email is near dead due to spam. In few years it will be new telefax.
People have been claiming that email is dying since the mid-90s. And here we are, with the only messaging protocol that's available to everyone on the internet: email.
Re: Retiring Wave
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Wave could have been a killer product, but for a key mistake that is a bat light for failure — it was positioned as a replacement for email. Email is the ultimate killer app and ultimate whipping boy.
The “key mistake” was that all of the technical parts were poorly architected and horribly buggy, and then they tried to scale up the user base using a massive amount of marketing hype before their product or infrastructure could handle the load. As a result all the hyped-up customers were confronted by a terrible user experience, felt burned, and left. Without a completely different technical implementation from top…
Maybe the tech was bad, but the marketing was worse. I never even tried Wave, so didn’t experience the bugs and bad UI, because I could never understand what it was or what family of problems it was trying to address.
Re: Retiring Wave
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
it wasn't. when it was release, it was actually introduced (internally) as something like, "what would email look like if were invented today?"
Not just internally. I remember the massive hype around this being the "next email." I excitedly got as many of my friends onto there as I could. I can't really pinpoint any one thing. There really was a mass of mistakes that all lead to this imploding heavily. I seem to recall that the fate of GWT was intertwined heavily with it. Very heavyweight widgets to support the general idea of massive collaboration in real t…
And the only thing I remember was that students / people started using to create the longest wave.
Re: Retiring Wave
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The “key mistake” was that all of the technical parts were poorly architected and horribly buggy, and then they tried to scale up the user base using a massive amount of marketing hype before their product or infrastructure could handle the load. As a result all the hyped-up customers were confronted by a terrible user experience, felt burned, and left. Without a completely different technical implementation from top…
Maybe the tech was bad, but the marketing was worse. I never even tried Wave, so didn’t experience the bugs and bad UI, because I could never understand what it was or what family of problems it was trying to address.
Agreed. In the modern app world, it's not enough to have great or useful tech, it has to be branded and communicated properly, not exactly Google's strong points.