Google Kills Wave • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Kills Wave

#91

Post by jaybobzin » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:06 PM UTC

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 how to turn on notifications if you want them.

The notification messages were also not very well thought out, it was often confusing what had changed, requiring you to log in to Wave just to read a new message that could have easily been read via email.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#92

Post by orangecat » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:07 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#93

Post by pjscott » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:07 PM UTC

mkramlich wrote: post #41

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.

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

Peter Norvig has confirmed this, and says that the great majority of Google's projects die before anybody even hears about them. This lets them try things out cheaper, so the ideas they do invest a lot of time and money into will have a higher probability of success.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/...

Re: Google Kills Wave

#94

Post by judofyr » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:07 PM UTC

runT1ME wrote: post #78

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…

You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day, or have it constantly open, etc. Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..

The point is that Wave is never going to replace email over the night, so in the beginning it's very useful to get an email whenever something interesting happens. As you receive more and more emails, you realize that it's a lot easier to just keep Wave constantly open and you'll turn off email notification.

But before that point Wave does not deserve its own tab, and because of the lack of email notifications it's very easy to simply forget about checking Wave.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#95

Post by timwiseman » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:08 PM UTC

runT1ME wrote: post #78

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…

You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day, or have it constantly open, etc. Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..

Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..

The better answer would have had settings available (defaulted to notifying) so users could choose when and how to be notified.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#96

Post by tomhogans » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:08 PM UTC

brown9-2 wrote: post #71

kenjackson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft announced, then released, spent $250M on advertising, and then killed a new phone in that time.

To be fair, Google did the same thing in the same time frame with the Nexus One, minus the ad budget. Sometimes disrupting existing markets and paradigms takes time, patience, and several iterations. (I'm still disappointed at how quickly they stopped the direct-sale idea with the Nexus One)

The biggest problem with selling the Nexus One direct was support. Carriers didn't want to support a phone that hadn't branded and Google couldn't accept that people don't want to ask a community message board and wait a few days for a reply when their phone doesn't work.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#97

Post by noodle » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:09 PM UTC

intranation wrote: post #18

noodle wrote: post #9

unfortunate. it was a good product, for the right market, but it was overhyped and it underdelivered.

And what was the market, exactly? Seems to me that not a single person I knew actually wanted to use it, or thought it filled a niche they needed filling.

its my understanding groups that had to do a high level of collaboration across several people found it pretty useful. i know some people that still use it for this and are happy, although i'm sure that if it closes down, they'll find another product and carry on.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#98

Post by wmf » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:09 PM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #79

wmf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know what the problems are that make Wave servers hard to write? I'm writing something similar right now, and if there are enormous problems coming up, it would be nice to know about them now.

The real-time UI appears to be the hardest part; Google's client is something like 20K lines of GWT code. (Technically the client isn't part of the Wave "server", but since AFAIK you aren't allowed to use Google's client with your own server, if you write a server you also have to write a client. Also, I don't think the distinction is particularly relevant in Web apps.)

Re: Google Kills Wave

#99

Post by mortenjorck » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:12 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #14

Goosey wrote: post #5

I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over. I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with…

I blame it on never understanding the UI, the way it did things, or its usefulness. It's like a chat you can't delete things from, and everyone sees what you type and all your mistakes? And you can post pictures? I just don't get it.

As with an unfortunately large number of Google things, Wave was an absolutely stunning work of engineering art with a merely passable UI. The engineers obviously drove the development process, with the designers not being invited in until it was too late.

But this is where there exists, not to mince words, a monumentally huge opportunity. As Google begins to open-source more of Wave, there's room for a more UX-focused team to really bring out the tech's potential.

I'm not talking a new skin or even a new home layout; I'm talking a new software product that uses the real-time collaboration system in an ingenious new way. Google solved the engineering problem; now someone needs to solve the interaction design problem.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#100

Post by InclinedPlane » Wed, Aug 04, 2010, 10:13 PM UTC

I said it before and I'll say it again: wave solved all of the wrong (easy) problems of communication and failed to tackle any of the hard problems. The result was a highly polished mashup of existing communication forms based on cutting edge technology that made for an excellent demo but a very poor (or at best niche) product. See also: the Segway.

P.S. Re: hard vs. easy problems: Wave tackled some hard challenges in the implementation space, which I think may have led the engineers into thinking they were building something innovative and worthwhile. However, the important bit is whether or not you've actually solved anything in the problem space.