Google Wave and the Difficulty of Radical Change

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."

Comments

Be radical.

[3vi1]

>> 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?

I couldn't disagree more

[TheoCryst]

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.

Re:I couldn't disagree more

[nine-times]

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.

Re:Too many geniuses?

[kestasjk]

"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

Re:Too many geniuses?

[nomel]

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.