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

Failure after 3 months?

[yyxx]

Google Wave was a collaboration tool, and that made it nearly useless during its limited preview. It was available generally for less than three months before Google killed it. That would be a ridiculously short time for any new service, let alone for one that actually requires network effects to become useful.

I don't know whether Google Wave would have replaced E-mail or chat; it had the potential to do that, but that was far off. But it was an excellent collaboration tool. It could have been Google's replacement for Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and systems like that, and it looked like it was on track for that. Incremental changes to GMail are not going to cut it.

With killing Wave, Google killed something that could have become quite important for them in the future. And they also killed the good will and trust of a lot of developers and users.

Google should have given Wave three years, not three months, of general availability.

technology for other apps

[Ubertech]

I think this is one instance where Google's limited release method failed spectacularly. When they started to release Wave, I had a bunch of people in mind to collaborate with, but only one or two of us had it. By the time it was available to the majority of us, we had already gone back to using other means of communication, including Google's own docs. For all its potential, we ended up only having two active waves of substance. Hopefully they'll be able to incorporate some of the more interesting concepts into Gmail or Gtalk, and I think Docs already has some simultaneous editing features. So wave may live on, just not as wave.

Wave fails if bad; but revolutionary change works

[theNAM666]

Google Wave stands or fails on its features and merits. And the Wave idea is actually incrementally seeping in across the Google suite of products, so the original article is simply... silly (stupid!).

In regards to the original topic, "Revolutionary" change, especially in software, is often remarkably... effective in sweeping away the ghosts of the past which weigh upon the minds of the present.

As example, a gem from the days of Wang which I just came across:

As an example of this strategy, a frustrated developer wrote Wang’s second generation e-mail system (Wang Office) over a long weekend. In his view–and he was right–the official spec meetings were taking too long. So he decided to cut through the bullshit and just code the thing (he’d designed Wang’s first generation e-mail system, Mailway, so he knew what he was doing). He sent out the new code to several large accounts, they loved it, and started calling headquarters asking, “We have the checkbook out–how do we buy this great e-mail system?” Back at headquarters, everyone (except for Steve) was going, “Huh, what are you talking about?” Once management realized that (1) customers wanted to buy it now and (2) doing it the “official” way would take another 18 months, they swallowed their pride, shot the official project, and gave Steve a small official slap while privately lauding his initiative.

/me files Matt Asay in the [bullshit|?|clueless|lost|confused] category.

Re:Too many geniuses?

[darkonc]

Longhorn, WinFS, etc. were probably more a product of MS Marketing than the 'too many Geniuses' problem. It's an old trick that they probably learned from IBM's heydays.

Promise your existing customer base ('everyone') a miracle (vaporware) product that will do everything that they ever wanted. Promise it next year. That way, when your competitors come out with a real product that does most of what your customers want -- or even all of what they really need, you can convince their CxO to "just wait until next year when our miracle product comes out -- then you won't have to deal with migration issues, etc.".

Then you can slowly move the target -- both what your 'miracle' product does and when it will be out -- until your promises and reality jive. By then your competitor's product will be easy to pooh-pooh as 'only slightly better than what we've got' and needing all of that migration work, etc.

Rinse, repeat.

Microsoft took a big hit with Longhorn -> Vista because Vista turned out to be such a massive dud. Now, MS is going to have a hard time convincing people to believe any of their long-term promises about much of anything.