Comment by tc
16 years ago
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.
Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook?
Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email.
Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does.
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PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network.
PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components.
PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.
We use it exclusively for our meeting status reports, etc.
It's just a wicked solid tool for meetings and out-of-band document collaboration. I'd love to see it continue. I'm sad it didn't get the adoption they wanted, but I also wonder what they expected when they didn't even really try to integrate it with GMail.
If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have better success for it.
If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have better success for it.
No question. Wave should have been an alternate view of your Gmail account. Instead it was a completely distinct environment that you had to manage separately, which most people aren't going to be bothered to do.
Not to mention that for the first few months, none of my friends had an account. So even though I wanted to Wave, I couldn't really do it.
Once a few of my friends joined in, we thought we could plan our road-trips etc. on it easily and share photos later. Even then, there were always a few who said "What's a Wave?".
Definitely. I would invite friends, they'd be excited, but no one would check it and thus no one would use it, since there was no way to integrate it with anything non-wave.
I'm fairly confused about what 'success' is supposed to have meant here.
The main reason I didn't like it is a very simple one, and it has to do with automatic sign-in to Google properties based on whether you're logged into Analytics or Gmail or the like.
Since we use a corporate email for Analytics but personal ones for Wave it meant having to switch logins all the time. Might sound trivial but actually put me off using the product at all.
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I agree. We use Wave for all kinds of communication in our startup, and it's just an amazing tool for small workgroup communications and document drafting.
I'm actually rather peeved it's going away, because (1) I don't want to waste a bunch of time trying to migrate data out of Wave, and (2) there really isn't much out there that can replace Wave in our workflow. We use Wave as a GUI-editable wiki where documents gracefully age out of view, and it's just great for that. I'm really going to miss it.
http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow I remember this resembles Wave, minus the wiki thing. It's not free, however.
Yea I just recently got into using it heavily with my remote devs and it has rocked my world.
Really bummed out about this. But then again when Google "kills" something they rarely pull the plug completely.. it either stays in limbo indefinitely or evolves into something else
The announcement leaves open the possibility that the live collaboration and/or wiki functionality could end up in Gmail soon enough anyway: “We … will … extend [Wave] technology for use in other Google projects.”
Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes.
Aren't these two sentences contradictory? 'Wave is a great product if you changed the interface, integration points and, really, if it was a different product'. I think there's a tendency to over-analyze the reasons Wave was not a success because it got a lot of coverage and came from Google - a company with a long track record of many successes. Whatever the merits of the over-arching idea of Wave, the actual implementation and the thing you got to use, frankly, blew. An interesting technology demo, maybe but as an actual product it was a horrendous, inscrutable, clunky mess - no amount of market targeting, faster approval of beta invites and a score of other remedies that don't address the basic deficiencies of the product (e.g. largely unusable) could have saved Wave. This remains true despite the fact that there exist a few merry bands of hyper-intelligent and/or masochistic mutants who have managed to get some use out of it.
I'm no mutant (and certainly not a a merry one), but I got a lot of use out of it. And I certainly didn't invest a lot of time into "figuring it out", I just used it in the simplest way I could, which is create new waves, talk to people on them, and that's it.
This proves, imo, that it wasn't a failure of product, but of marketing. Most people opened Wave and had no idea what to expect and no idea what to do with it, which led them to believe it was an "inscrutable mess". If I'd have shown you Wave without all the hoopla that Google used, I'd have said "here's a tool for project collaboration. Open a new topic whenever you want to talk about it, then all the team members can add/edit content and everyone can see it live, and it just works!". And I think then you would both a) understand it immediately, and b) understand whether it is of value to you.
Google set up such different expectations for it that it's no wonder people didn't "get it".
This proves, imo, that it wasn't a failure of product, but of marketing.
The fact that you personally found it useful doesn't, in itself, prove that it was a failure of marketing although, presumably, it proves you found it useful.
I know I didn't just look at it and close the window, completely not understanding what it was about. I understand what it is about, I just think it's bad. It has a dreadful UI and massive overlaying of concepts and features without much coherence. Just as an example, one superficial but reasonably accurate sign of clunky, ill-thought-out design is the presence of made-up terminology - wave has this in spades, what with the waves and the wavelets and the blips. These are fundamental usability problems - they can't be fixed by marketing.
Whatever the merits of the over-arching idea, the actual implementation and the thing you got to use, frankly, blew. An interesting technology demo, maybe but as an actual product it was a horrendous, inscrutable, clunky mess. [] This remains true despite the fact that there exist a few merry bands of hyper-intelligent and/or masochistic mutants who have managed to get some use out of it.
I think you've just described >50% of all software.
Or more. But most software doesn't get the coverage Google Wave had. We tend not to theorize at length why obviously terrible software fails, we just say 'oh that thing? yeah it sucked' and move on. I'm just making a simple point - Wave wasn't successful because it wasn't very good.
I totally agree and would add SharePoint as a potential victim. Maybe Google was the only company that could invent Wave but it was definitely the wrong company to market and sell it.
Not sure if the pieces of wave that are open-source are enough to build a product but there is definitely a real email problem inside corporations that Wave seems to have potential to solve. Google has very limited interest in products for intranets, their focus is the wider Internet.
The point I'm trying to make to this startup community is that there's money to made solving the corporate email problem. And the second mouse gets the cheese.
At the time wave came in, you already had email, twitter and facebook. I think it became one more thing to check. Given that it was supposed to be 21st century email, the fact that you couldn't switch to using wave instead of gmail is, I think, what didn't get it the adoption. If magically all your gmail were available and accessible via wave as well from day 1, we might all be waving now.
I know there were some dev attempts at bridging the two, but they were so lame as to be unusable as a replacement.
I did end up using it for some personal planning, a bit of group work within our company, etc. .. but it currently is still just "one more thing to check".
I think that there is another variable at play over here. Google needs to prove to Wall Street that they are a "serious" company. They have received a lot of rubs over their engineering culture from investors, and business onlookers. I've read people write stuff like " when did you last 'wave' someone?" etc. If for some reason Google faces a lean time, then such practices will be viewed as an excess by them and it will deprecate their evaluation.
So, what could appease almighty Wall Street better than this signal that Google is willing to kill a product, no matter how exciting, if it doesn't meet its bottom line?
In a way this is a really clever compromise, but taking such decisions may in fact hurt Google in the longer run by diluting its culture. Sometimes, the most promising of technologies is not economically promising in the shorter run, but who'll explain this to Wall Street?
We were unable to use Wave because it never worked for hosted Google accounts. That sucks.
Do you mean Google Apps for your domain? It does work. Quite well in fact.
I can confirm this. We have been using Wave with Apps since just after Wave launched. It took off internally for a while and then petered out, but it is definitely there. To get it, go to:
http://wave.google.com/a/myappsdomain.com
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I suspect that now that Google is trying to compete directly with Facebook, they looked at wave and saw that it wasn't going to be adapted by many non-corporate users, so they reallocated the resources to something that would be.
> Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email.
Yes, a thousand times yes. If Google did the last 10% o the work:
* Sell a pre-packaged, serviced VM (in VMware, HyperV, and Xen formats)
* Made an Outlook plugin for wave
They would have a real 'embrace and extend' on their hands.
Too bad you could never run it inside the firewall AFAIK.
All the protocols were open-sourced as part of the initiative. I think they envisioned a world in which inside-the-wall installations existed in the same way the companies have Exchange servers today.
Except Microsoft is willing to sell you Exchange Server but Google wasn't willing to sell you a Wave server. Writing your own is very difficult; no one has managed to match Google's implementation.
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Novell is working in something you could like: http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/
One wonders how the folks on the Novell Pulse team are feeling about this announcement. And how many hours they may have spent on "interoperability with Google Wave through the federation protocol".
http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-unveils-real-time-co...
There's no reason they couldn't provide an appliance (like the Google Search Appliance: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html) or simply make it available for a local install (like every mail server used by every company that cares about things being 'inside the firewall').
When they got the right interfaces, integration and extensions they will re-release it as another tool (It will be another tool then).
re. PS #3: I don't think it'll take 10 years to show up in gmail - at least, I hope not. I think Wave's great, but it's utility was limited by keeping it completely separated from existing tools (email, buzz, chat etc.).