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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.
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).
My work here is dung.
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)
Funny, I feel the same way about websites whose style sheets involve great big floating things that don't go away when I scroll down. :)
(Serves me right for reading TFA...)
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!"
There should be a movement to save it if for no other reason than it rhymes.
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.
When I first saw reports and demos of Wave, my reaction was basically "wtf is this crap?" When some of the younger people at my last job (web hosting company) started using it and I saw it "in action," that basically just solidified my initial impression. I couldn't figure out what it was really for (in a "solution to a problem" sense) or why I would want to use it.
It seems to be just an extreme conclusion of an ADHD society. It gives too much too quickly, all jumbled up and mixed together. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like my IM being separate from my email, and maybe its OK to use LDAP to pre-populate my contacts, but that's just about where I draw the line.
I suspect that I'm far from being the only person who also though Wave was pretty much just the worst idea ever and that using it would cause brain hemorrhages. No amount of marketing or alternate release schedules is going to make up for the fact that Wave was just insanely stupid and never should have seen the light of day in the first place.
Tag this story good riddance and be done with it.
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?
.. he is probably right. I never heard of the thing before now (though I probably would not have been interested).
CC.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about we've covered it a few times.
My work here is dung.
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.
Personally I found Wave invaluable for any number of creative applications - gaming, writing, taking notes for projects, planning various activities. I blame its failure on all you jerks for not taking a second look.
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!
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?
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.
but has netcraft confirmed it?
rewriting history since 2109
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...
Thing is, though... Google DOES seem to give up on its failures. Hell, it even seems to give up on some of its minor successes.
It almost seems like Google has attention deficit disorder. Apart from Gmail and its base search business, almost everything else they have that's successful seems to have been bought from someone else after it already was a hit.
This space available.
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.
The biggest problem was that it was more of a "message board" than an "instant messenger". The major failing was that it was indeed built into the web browser. It wasn't the type of IM that would give you a pop-up when someone said something. So for that, we used other IMs (Crappy Microsoft one, I think) - in my current company, we use Skype a lot.
No one had the discipline, temperate, or screen real estate to devote to wave - when what we really needed it for was occasional real-time conversations with a large dispersed group.
The marketing maybe. The phone itself is an excellent piece of hardware, the only thing that even slightly tempts me away from my N1 right now is a Droid X and with Motorola seemingly in the anti custom-ROM camp I refuse to support them.
I still think Google gave up too soon there, if enough consumers realized that buying the phone yourself then getting a plan without the phone subsidy built in is ultimately cheaper more carriers would be forced to offer those types of plans. It saddens me that I may have to purchase my next Android phone through the carrier and locked.
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...
DancesWithBlowTorch, keep an eye on Mozilla's Bespin. I've used the very basic skeleton project they had and think they're on track but it's coming along and will hopefully firm up once HTML5 support and standards become common place. I don't know how fluid it will become with real time updates but imagine editing your code anytime from any browser that is HTML 5 compliant and your collaborators seeing that. Not sure how many languages they plan on incorporating but when it's done, your source will exist and be compiled in the cloud. Maybe not ideal for a business but for open source collaboration ... really neat!
My work here is dung.
Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy, but I've been on the internet since the days when the most useful protocol was telnet, and I thought the same thing as you did when I saw wave. In fact, I tried asking a bunch of much younger people about it, and the best answer I got was that "it allows you to collaborate".
Q: "better than a shared whiteboard and phone call?" ."
A: "well, no . .
Q: "How do you keep everybody from trashing the design with their own agendas?"
A: "You can roll back"
That's the solution? To restore from a backup and waste everybody's time?
While Wave was definitely cool, and I don't fault Google for releasing it (I love playing with new stuff), it bugs the crap out of me that Every New Thing gets a fresh round of "buzz" and internet cheer-leading whether or not it's better than or even as good as what we already have.
Wave was confusing, and it demanded a big shift in thinking up front -- sort of like vim. You couldn't just add little changes into your workflow incrementally. On top of that, you had to have someone else to do it with. It was hard to be a geeky guy who was interested, and willing to climb the learning curve on your own.
So imagine you use a typical gui screen editor. And you want to learn vim. And the only way you can move forward is if you find someone else who's willing to use vim with you while you learn.
Most people just aren't going to do it.
Incremental gradual change is easier for people.
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.
So, we've seen several explanations for its failure in the last two days:
1.) It was invitation-only for too long.
2.) There was little promotion (you've got to be kidding me).
3.) It was too far ahead of its time, and people are used to what they have now.
Couldn't it just be that it sucked and was an unusable concept to begin with? It was an engineering pet project.
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.
It appears that Brazil and India use it the most.
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Solutions looking for a problem rarely do well, and that is what wave was. It was neat tech and fancy UI that did not solve any problems that older and better understood technologies were already addressing well. Thus the majority of the people who really enjoyed it, mostly enjoyed it because they got to learn and master a new game.
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.