221–230 of 246 posts
whatever the reason, kind of sad anyways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft made $250M profit yesterday.
While that sounds great, according to http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(+microsoft+profit+)+/+... it's actually 51 million/day. So it took them a full week to make the 250 million. Or was yesterday special?
That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it out. Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted? edit: would be nice if th…
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I find this quite disappointing. Wave as a concept -- and apparently its underlying implementation -- is brilliant. It pretty much exactly fixes a number of significant barriers I've repeatedly, persistently encountered in professional, collaborative communication.
However, in a fashion that's becoming all too typical for Google, the user interface was spartan and disjointed to the point of outright sucking for anyone who was not an "uebergeek" already at least passingly familiar with the paradigms they were using.
Just like with their Android Nexus phone: They didn't need to improve the technology further as much as they needed to make it usable for the common user. In the phone's case, that meant real customer support. In Wave's case, that meant a meaningful, obvious user interface and much less spartan documentation, including non-linear textual references and not just so many overcute, time-consuming, and shared-environment-adverse videos many of which were broken into frustratingly small snippets. The videos did, I suppose, demonstrate the dynamic interface better than a bunch of text and static pictures might, but then this was in significant part the fault of the interface that gave no visual indicators of what to click or drag, much less what doing so would accomplish.
Google really should give Wave more time, and devote a small cadre of staff to fixing the UI, and another small cadre of staff to some coherent, consistent promotion and public training/documentation. Once people grasp what it can do and how to do it in a quick, intuitive fashion, I argue they would have users aplenty. They've already added it as a beta feature to their Google Apps online office software suite. That crowd is ripe for adoption, if adoption is made straightforward.
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 know there were some dev attempts at bridging the two, but they were so lame as to be unusable as a replacement.
I did end up using it for some personal planning, a bit of group work within our company, etc. .. but it currently is still just "one more thing to check".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the protocols were open-sourced as part of the initiative. I think they envisioned a world in which inside-the-wall installations existed in the same way the companies have Exchange servers today.
Except Microsoft is willing to sell you Exchange Server but Google wasn't willing to sell you a Wave server. Writing your own is very difficult; no one has managed to match Google's implementation.
Sure we could spend time and effort to re-create the wheel, but if Google wants to monetize it, they will do the work for us and provide us with a product we can purchase.