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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.
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!"
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.
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!
Because Google is abandoning it.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I think the problem is that it was in a restrictive invite state too long.
People would get access, realize they only had 2-3 contacts that also had access, and then return to communication methods that were more accessible. I tried Wave for a little, but I basically only knew one other person that had it. I think I stopped bothering after a week.
GMail, on the other hand, could survive for a long period of heavy invite restrictions because it was fundamentally designed to communicate with other email users. So it didn't matter much if your friends had gmail, as long as they had ANY email access, GMail was an improvement in your ability to communicate with your friends.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Insightful is the fact that the comment gets moderated according to it's first word. Let's see if this works...
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
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.
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.