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Google Wave and the Difficulty of Radical Change

Posted by Soulskill on from the maybe-that's-why-we-don't-have-flying-cars dept.

cedarhillbilly writes "An article by Matt Asay in the Register takes on Google Wave from the perspective of visionary change versus incremental change. He suggests that visionaries should focus on smaller transformations of our day-to-day lives rather than leapfrogging. 'Much as it may want to radically change the world for users and developers, radical change generally happens over time, through a series of incremental, unexceptional edits to existing technology and processes.' Perhaps Google sensed this when they famously said they were worried about having too many geniuses. Asay revisits the point that the open source development model necessarily builds on a community of contributors and users, and not the mad scientist in an ivory tower."

8 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Be radical. by 3vi1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >> He suggests that visionaries should focus on smaller transformations of our day-to-day lives rather than leapfrogging.

    Why can't they make something radical, then add on compatibility stepping stones for a transition period? Would Wave have been so unused if you could read your normal POP3 mail in it and intercommunicate with traditional IM systems?

    1. Re:Be radical. by TarMil · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Would Wave have been so unused if you could read your normal POP3 mail in it and intercommunicate with traditional IM systems?

      This is the real deal. Wave was too far away from everything we know, and had too few links with the rest of the world. People accept radical novelties when they can blend in with what they are used to.

    2. Re:Be radical. by hedwards · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It wasn't an issue of being radical, it was an issue of it being a collaborative tool, restricted to a small number of people and lacking an obvious purpose. People don't generally learn to use a tool in case it becomes helpful later on, they learn to use it because they have an idea as to what to do with it. They might only need it for a theoretical contingency plan, but they at least have an idea what the purpose is. It's rare for something to take off just from random tinkering.

  2. I couldn't disagree more by TheoCryst · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google Wave didn't fail because it was "too innovative" or "too radical." History is jam packed full of inventions and technologies that succeeded precisely because they were drastically better than what came before them (lightbulb versus candle, car versus horse, calculator versus abacus, GUI versus CLI). Google Wave failed for a combination of reasons. It wasn't marketed well, it didn't really solve any problems, and it just wasn't "better" enough over the standard ways of browsing the web.

    Google Wave was a cool engineering project, but never should have been taken to market.

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    1. Re:I couldn't disagree more by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the main problems were:

      (a) It was unfocused. What were they trying to build, a replacement for email or a collaborative word processor? It wasn't really great at either. Take a lesson from Apple-- sometimes it's better for a product to do 3 things really really well than to do 10 things poorly.

      (b) The limited invite system is not a good way to launch a communications product that only works for talking to other people with that product. Invites worked for Gmail because you could still email everyone. Waves only worked with other Wave users, and there weren't very many of them. Google should have polished the system more and then launched big. If they made a big splash, they might have captured enough interest to keep it going. Instead everyone tried it out for a week or two, said, "this doesn't seem to be useful," and then they never looked at it again.

  3. Re:Too many geniuses? by kestasjk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." - Ford

    Sometimes projects swing and miss, let's not forget the dozens of promises made about Longhorn before it got scrapped and downsized, WinFS and whatnot; it wasn't as public but far more resources were wasted, and I expect Google has internal projects which come to nothing constantly as well..

    I don't think there are any great insights to draw from Google Wave; they worked on it, it got hyped up, it didn't catch on, bummer. Doesn't take a genius or a madman in an ivory tower for that to happen

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  4. Wave was actually interesting by CarpetShark · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you used it as a chat program then you misused it and shouldn't be suprised that it failed as a chat program. It was supposed to give people a way to collaborate on documents and projects.

    Are you sure about that?

    My impression was that it was intended to be a replacement for email, im, and other realtime communication systems on the net. It wasn't an app to help with projects or conversations; it was a protocol/server platform for messaging, just like the SMTP protocol and mailserver that makes up email, but more flexible. I think the idea was to replace email, IM, web forums, twitter, etc. all with one flexible, scalable platform that could handle new kinds of data, provide gateways to disparate systems (connect your IM to your SMS, or your webcam to your audio-only phone, for instance), and to make it all expandable by bots which could do automated processing of messages.

    It actually could have been very cool, but it was too big for the PITIFUL amount of weight google threw behind it. They didn't believe in their product. If they had, they would have built an exchange-killing open source mail/groupware server on top of it, which was fully backwards-compatible with Email, IM (including MSN as part of the exchange-killing thing), etc.

    THAT needed to be a radical product launch. None of this beta crap; a SOLID, powerful, game-changing release of free server code for everyone to install and use. Where the gradual change comes in is integrating their translation engine to make global communication possible, integrating google voice, integrating reader, and generally taking the world by storm by combining all their existing products into one great solution that had ZERO competition.

    Now that would have been radical. Launching a half-baked idea with a horrible web-ui and some code for a cut-down version that no one cared enough to look at? Not so much.

  5. Re:Too many geniuses? by nomel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can somewhat agree, but I think it was mostly releasing poor code that caused its death. To me, *the* biggest problem with wave was that it was virtually unusable for the majority of its life. If you reached near 50 edits, the page would begin to crawl and the whole timeline system would come to a standstill. Once you neared 100 blips, the typing would slow to a few characters per second...on a dual core system. Loading was into the 10 to 20 second range, and scrolling with their whole custom rubber band scroll bar became unbearable, well more so than it already was. The code was *horribly* unoptimized. This is why all of the heavy users that I knew, including myself, stopped using it. When they finally got around to making the interface something usable, we weren't interested anymore.

    Also, the whole lack of inline images (without searching for a bot), lack of gmail integration, and lack of blip management (copy, move, etc) was a real PITA.