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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."
>> 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?
Nobody who spent any time using Wave thought that the problems were due to too many geniuses in the mix.
A real genius doesn't just show you a vision. A real genius creates a useful artifact that solves a problem of importance. We're not talking about art.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
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.
Warning: Contents May Be Flammable. Keep Out Of Reach Of Children.
No, it doesn't, at least according to this rule: "Any software in this century that reinvents the scroll bar deserves to fail" - http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/lessons-from-wave-and-kin/
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.
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.
Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.
Like the airplane?
The powered airplane had it's first flight in December 1903, first military application in combat was 1911, mass use in warfare was 1914, so 11 years for it.
Atomic weapons, patented 1934, first test July 16 1945, first combat use August 6 1945, mass production 1946.
Radar, first operational radar system 1935, widespread use 1940.
Probably was being too radical more than the initial stability problems and bugs what hurt the grow that KDE was having by the time the version 4 was introduced. Still, as was basically "the" direction to follow with the entire platform (you could leave it going to gnome, stay with kde 3.x while all the apps move forward, or adapt to the new approach) it survived, and now is growing (not having hard numbers of gnome, kde and other linux desktops, but i think it went that way)
Google did a great job creating an open protocol. But they made two mistakes:
1. They were not open enough. Although they had suggested that people would be able to build their own clients (and demoed a curses based client) they never opened an API for writing a wave client. They wanted it to be a flagship web application - but just as people like all sorts of different clients for email (even if many now like web clients), they would probably have liked client choice for wave - especially if 3rd party clients had shown waves along side email and the like.
2. They were too open. Their programming model for wave (web-hosted applications with read and write access to your wave) had huge security implications. It was not clear from the UI who would have access to your data and when.
Both of these were things that slowed adoption of wave.
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.
Should have been, "Google Wave and the difficulty of flogging stuff that's shit"
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.
I see no reason to discourage either radical new hardware nor radical new software. It will flower or perish on its own merits.
Couldn't agree more! There is way too much "sticking a tail on it and calling it a weasel" going on anyway and way not enough REAL innovation. Which creates all these super-clumsy, over-inflated monstrosities that don't even do the job they're supposed to be doing properly any longer. Einstein said "When the solution is simple, God is smiling." That's real genius, nothing else will do!
Love without logic is insanity. And vice versa.
I spend 8+ hours a day programming in front of 3 screens with about 10 tabs open in each and I've never even heard of it. Maybe, just maybe, that's why it failed.
1. It failed because it had bad user interface design. There's nothing radical about that. In fact, it's all too common in projects run by most hackers and code monkeys aiming to make a "cool engineering project." The difference between those projects and Google Wave is there are people crammed up Google's bum, willing to call Google developers visionary geniuses whose efforts are beyond what mere mortals can comprehend instead of lambasting them as they would anyone else for lacking usability in their software.
2. More importantly, it failed because Google intentionally made it fail. It was axed in less than three months of being public. Something very weird happened there, but who knows if we'll ever really know why.
3. The best, most successful advancements in computing were done in leaps and bounds, not the safe, incremental nonsense brought on by the commercialization of computing in the 80's.
Are you telling me an iPhone isn't radical? A desktop Web browser with a display 1/4 the pixels of the original Web browser and 1/8th the size, no mouse, no keyboard, no windows (the document floats inside the viewport), and holistic zooming is not radical? Yes, it is radical, but it is also usable.
With Wave, Google got blinded by how pretty it is under the hood and forgot to design a user interface. Wave should have looked like Microsoft Word v5.1, it should have shown the user "replace your Word, Email, and Content Management System publishing workflow with me." Have you seen how a company puts up a typical Web page? Word documents going around in email, eventually being pasted into a CMS, it is a joke. If MS Office didn't suck it would have had Wave-like features by now and no CMS would be needed by Office users.
Google needs humility. People think Apple is arrogant because they are great, but the truth is, they are great because they are humble. They did only one phone, and it took them 4-5 years to do it, working away totally in secret, iterating and testing and innovating. If Google was not so impressed with whatever they poop out, they would actually finish projects and make usable and successful products.
Even in ads, why did Apple have to do iAds? Why didn't Google offer ads that don't look like shit, ads that take advantage of HTML5?
How has Search improved in the past 5 years? How has it been made easier for the 90% of users who do not know how to use all the options like -term and site:foo.com and will never know that?
So call a failure a failure. Wave is a failure.