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Why Wave Failed
Florian Wardell submitted a little discussion piece about Why Wave Failed. He blames marketing and the staged rollout. Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly. Had I been able to read my regular mail in the same UI, I might have been tempted to use it more.
I thought Wave was some sort of surfing app or something physicists used for their QED experiments.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
.. he is probably right. I never heard of the thing before now (though I probably would not have been interested).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The poor performance of Wave when it first debuted quickly killed any hype it had going. Everybody was eager to try it out, then realized it ran like a dog in pretty much everything except Chrome (and even sometimes in Chrome, too.) That and the fact that it was a standalone app - I wanted to be able to work with my Google Docs, share items from my Reader, and work on emails from within Wave, spreading information between all three if I desired.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
Hasn't it been out of an invite only state for less than 2 months? Certainly hasn't been around for much more than a year, if that. How the hell can someone claim it's already failed?
Google needs to release the source code to their client. I think if it were available as a reference implementation to be tweaked and forked for free that it could be turned into something very useful, especially in corporate settings.
Why did email become so successful? It solved a problem that seemed real to most people: the ability to send text over long distances very quickly and without paying a lot.
What problem did Wave solve? None of the problems Wave solved were perceived as problems by most people, so nobody saw Wave as a "killer app."
Palm trees and 8
All I knew was that is was called Google Wave, was being hyped and I needed an invite to use it.
Why should it be a big surprise this thing never got wide spread adoption?
The aspect of Google's wave rollout that I found baffling was their more or less complete inability to conceptually separate(at least in their marketing messages, which is bad, possibly in some of their internal thinking, which would be worse) the specific "Google wave" webapp they had created; frankly a rather rough and somewhat niche-y thing, from the wave protocol, which had considerably greater potential to power a variety of frontend activities in a standardized way that would allow for productive interaction between them.
The closest analogy that I can think of offfhand would be if XMPP had been introduced by releasing a Pidgin fork named "XMPP" and offering no particularly interesting benefits aside from instant messaging over XMPP rather than Oscar or IRC or whatever. The world would have greeted it with a collective "meh." As it is, though, XMPP is capable of running all sorts of more or less real time communication scenarios behind the scenes, basic chat being a small subset of that. Similarly, Wave the protocol is quite powerful and interesting, "Wave" the webapp is kind of blah.
Had it augmented my email, I'd probably have looked closer. Instead, it tried to replace it. I have too much invested in my email addresses to supplant them simply. Most people do, too.
The main problem with this was that it solved problems that nobody was having. If I needed Wave, I would have used it, and found the time to learn it. But, no. I heard from new converts that this new software was great, would change my life, put hair on my bald spot, etc., but I've heard plenty of similar cries of pleasure from other early adopters (myspace, friendster, etc) and never trusted them, and it turned out I was right. Plus, it ties you too closely to Google.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Google Checkout is (was?) only available in three countries, not even close physically to one another. How can that NOT fail?
Why wave failed: Because it didn't do anything. It was a glorified chat box. Document collaboration is neat, but you've been able to do that with Google Docs and others for years. Realtime document collaboration? I can think of some times when that would be neat, but most documents have one owner. Besides, you would need to be able to edit MS Office documents realtime for that to be useful. It the "innovations" you bring to the table are drag 'n drop and live typing updating, it might be time to throw in the towel.
I'm glad Google has released a ton of things that haven't caught on. The things that has caught on, like Google Voice or maps or Android, has become incredibly useful. And there are parts of the world where Orkut is essential. But Wave was one of those failed experiments. It just didn't push far enough.
The ______ Agenda
Yes. I would have downloaded it the first week if it weren't for that "invitation" gimmick. I had a specific use case in mind and a specific group of people to use it with, but I realized I probably couldn't get my collaborators (non-IT people) to watch the 1-hour video (hell I could not sit through all of that), and to try to explain to them "you need an invitation to download this" would have resulted in blank looks at best. I figured I'd just wait till Google did something to make adoption easier.
I could have probably networked and asked someone for an invitation, but that is rather missing the point that I don't feel I should have to beg for an invitation to try out Google's new software. If they had wanted me to try it, they could have, you know, tried not preventing me.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Unintuitive editing. I tried it a few times, and kept ruining waves with new sections or comments that I couldn't delete, and I had trouble keeping things organized. If the product had been easier to learn without instruction manuals, I would be using it a lot, but as it stands I don't have the patience to learn it and get anyone I want to collaborate to learn it too. It was just too much effort.
Insightful is the fact that the comment gets moderated according to it's first word. Let's see if this works...
Wave failed for basic marketing reasons. Essentially, it was impossible to explain Google's vision of Wave in an elevator. If, instead, they had marketed as "21st century email", it would have had a better chance (it still has). Also, they built an impressive platform that allowed essentially anything... and forgot to put in the basics (for example, an integrated, easy to use version of a mailing list) Marketing essentially to Google geeks only didn't help either. Did you see any promotion of Wave in Google sites? (like the one for Chrome in the hompage when using IE) Also, account type proliferation is BAD. I already have enough trouble explaining to people that they don't need a _Gmail_ account to use Google services, just a _Google_ account. Now we had these addresses that _looked like_ emails, but weren't. And you still required a google account to get one. In a nutshell, Google should have done what it did with Gmail: do one thing and do it right. Solve a pain point. Only AFTER that has taken off, reveal the whole amazing plataform that powers it.
As of July 2010, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut 65th in the world; the website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide
Orkut doesn't sound like a flop to me either. It may not be popular in the US, but that really doesn't make it a flop.
which is totally what she said
Wait, so you're saying that every unsuccessful idea explored by an innovating tech company is a flop? Sure Google has explored some business areas that have not panned out, but that's just how innovation works. Do you have any idea how much money Microsoft blows through in R&D for products that never make it to market? I don't, but I'm betting they consider it a pretty typical business expense.
Checkout was deployed in a limited area to evaluate interest and real world functionality. Google determined that it was not worth pursuing and dropped it. Not every idea is going to hit it big.
Look at Gmail. How long did it stay in Beta? How many options were made available in Labs? Some hit it big, some did not. That's how innovation works. Google has just been successful enough with their hits to be able to live through their misses.
Wave has existed for three months or so. That's roughly how long it's been fast, stable and available to everyone. Just what did Google expect to happen in such a short time?
Wave needed at least another _year_ or two to gain traction, not a few weeks. I somehow suspect the cost of running it was too high compared to any perceived way of monetizing it in the short term, and they pulled the plug.
I suppose the good thing about it is that nobody's had time to become too dependent on it just yet. We do use it where I work, but so far we've held off on making ourselves dependent on it; wise choice it would seem. We did have plans in that direction though, wrongly assuming that since Google added it to Apps it was here to stay.
I for one will miss it quite a lot, it made some activities so much easier than the alternatives, but I'll live.
"Solution in search of a problem"?
Here's the problem. This week, I dragged a work related email out of my archive, hit reply-all, added a couple of extra recipients, top-posted a "why has nothing been done about this yet" comment at the top, and hit send.
There were a few replies, some of which added new people to the conversation. So there were multiple threads going on with different subsets of the relevant people seeing them. Then another colleague chimed in independently, so I forwarded him one of the mails, which contained some, but not all, of the conversation so far.
If all this had happened in a Wave, everyone would have been party to the whole conversation, and latecomers would have been able to catch up.
That it could seamlessly turn into a chat, is great. That we could collaboratively edit a wavelet is useful too.
I'd have used Wave a lot more if we'd had one inside our intranet firewall.
The problem, as I see it, was that Wave was only accessible to geeks. You had to have connections just to get into the service in the first place. People who check their email once a week do not have those connections, yet those are the people who, through the organizations* they are involved in, would have benefited most from the service.
I don't think Wave was ever going to change the world, but had Google marketed it to the right people, I think it would have been more successful.
* Think small non-profits who are just starting to learn you can exchange Word documents while talking about it over the telephone. I know of a few of them.
Yeah. And it would have been useful if they provided a reference client. They're the only ones that had the time and interest to pull that off, and they were too busy creating the "Gmail" version. Where's the "Thunderbird" version?
I have several acquaintances whom I feel would have benefited greatly from Wave.
I'm all like, Wave is exactly the tool you have been looking for. They are like great, how can I try it out? Me: Well, you need to find some random person on the internet to give you an invite. Them: Okay... I'll go back to what I'm doing now.
Wave failed, in my opinion, because the only people who had access to it were the people who had no reason to use it.
Google is not crying, complaining, bitching, or asking for sympathy about this. they merely stated that they have axed the development of it. Hell, they're probably happy as I'm sure it was taking up resources within the company that can now be directed towards something else. Every single company pours cash into R&D, and 90% of it goes nowhere. The only difference with google is that we SEE all those products, while other companies keep them internal. I actually think that's pretty cool.
Are you serious? Voice communications have no place in business? In almost all cases I can think of, I can either waste hours conferring with someone over e-mail and dealing with misinterpretations and unanswered questions (most business people are horrible readers), or I can pick up the phone and call someone and have everything sorted out within minutes. No misunderstandings, no delays. No place in business indeed.
I guess they'll have to settle for doing quite well in 2 rather large, rapidly expanding markets... poor them, missing out on the rather large but slowly shrinking Western European and US markets. I'm sure they're terribly upset about having so much growth potential at their door step, and at not needing to "break into" demographics that other companies are just starting to realize they real should be targeting. I'll bet it keeps them up at night thinking about what a terrible failure that's been.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
You obviously didn't have a project which involved rapid-prototyping with customers, copious tickets from various platforms (dev, staging, UAT, etc), numerous draft specifications, code developed from geographically separate sites and timezones, etc, etc.
Trying to keep all that together in various apps (email, ticket systems, word docs) is very time-consuming and error-prone. Wave was, in my (brief) experience of it, a powerful solution to this problem.
The O.P. is right, it was pushed to the wrong people. I only knew about it secondhand through a workmate who knew a Google employee. It was too 'cliquey' and only available to geeks who didn't give a screw about it. Real shame.