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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?
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.
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.
"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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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.
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.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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.