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.

Comments

I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...

[eldavojohn]

Whatever the reason for Wave’s failure is, the fact remains: There are two types of people, the ones that love Wave, and the ones that don’t know what it is.

Well, I guess I don't exist then. I tried Wave, I understand that it's supposed to be a collaboration tool more than just a glorified IM Client. And I don't love it -- I don't hate it, either. If it cost money I would hate it. But since it's open source and free I kind of view it as a solution to a problem I don't have. My coworkers and I played around with it for a day, noticed some tiny problems with arrival times of messages and the like (things that would probably be ironed out) but after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.

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.

Well, to counter that, I personally found it to be too confusing and not intuitive enough. Adding in my e-mail would have just made it an indiscernible mess. GMail is already busy enough, I'm not going to be able to consume that inside Wave. Doing one thing really well is often more valuable to me than doing a lot of things really well and trying to cram them into one experience ... this UI bloat really wears on me.

Meanwhile, we’ll have to include Wave to Google’s increasing list flops: The Nexus One, Google Answers, Google Checkout, Google Viewer, the Knol, Orkut, Wave, and Buzz.

Fail early, fail often, right? I feel bad for Novel's Pulse and SAP's Cloudave which I think were built up to interact with Wave but at the same time I don't think it was forced on them nor do either of them have to stop working on that product if Google is dropping out of the game (open source is great!). Google's failures are far less painful to me than another company's failures so I'll gladly tolerate them ... maybe even appreciate them because they'll get something right one of these days (look at Android going nuts).

Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...

[pudge]

Yeah, eldavojohn, I knew what it was and tried and never thought of a reason why I would want to spend time trying it again. I didn't even play around with it for a day ... maybe 15 minutes, got bored, moved on, never looked back.

I suspect most people who tried it did similarly.

The thing about putting Gmail inside it is that then it might have given someone a reason to use it. As it stood, most people had no reason to use it.

It was a busy and complicated solution to a problem almost no one had.

Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...

[DancesWithBlowTorch]

after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.

Just recently, I was trying to write code (Matlab code, and the resulting academic paper in LaTeX) with someone on the other end of the continent, so we gave Wave a try. Within minutes I realised that it's useless even for this, the task it was seemingly built for.

The reason: It's a sandbox. If you write code, you like to be able to save it, and compile it. To do either of the two you have to, literally, select, copy and paste your code from the wave into your IDE / text editor / local file system. That of course breaks the whole "keep everything in sync in one place in the cloud" idea.

So I guess there is one, and only one use case for wave: If you want to write unformatted text in collaboration with others, for the sole purpose of notetaking and, eventually, printing it on a piece of scrap paper. I guess there are not that many people out there in the world who actually need this sort of functionality. For everyone else, Wave is a hassle.

Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...

Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...

[hedwards]

The Nexus One and Google Checkout are hardly flops, I have a Nexus One and when available I prefer Google Checkout over Paypal.

The problem with Wave was that it was an invite only service which didn't interoperate with anything that had an established install base. Likewise, when I logged in the couple times I have, I couldn't figure out what it was really for.

I blame (the lack of) security options

[AtariDatacenter]

Google Wave was only useful to me if I could trust 100% of the participants in the Wave. Yes, yes, there is a roll-back to undo damage. Not good enough.

If I had a group of Internet participants, that absolutely wasn't the case. There was no in-between. Either you trusted someone and they could do almost anything, or you didn't. And damage was extremely easy to do. There wasn't anything else that I could find, like moderator pre-approval.

Public groups were too much trouble under Google wave. A group of students collaborating on a private assignment? Not so much.

Re:Subliminal messaging

[Abstrackt]

Insightful is the fact that the comment gets moderated according to it's first word. Let's see if this works...

Interesting, your theory appears correct.