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Comment by zavulon

16 years ago

Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that.

I really hope Buzz is next.

13 comments

zavulon

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edanm  16 years ago

Disagree entirely. Mainly cause I'm a very happy Wave user, and I think it absolutely has a place. It's just not the place Google envisioned at first (it's also not the same product they pitched at first).

This is, imo, a failure to Pivot. They have a working tool that, by their own admission, has many users. Why not capitalize on this fact, and start selling the product to the people it is useful for? I'm guessing it's just because Google likes huge, spectacular products over smaller, but still quite successful alternatives.

SkyMarshal  16 years ago

I think they're killing it too quickly. It's not like it was a resounding failure.

Those who have adapted it and taken the time to really learn and use it swear by it, which strongly implies there is opportunity for it. It's not so much a product failure as a launch or marketing failure.

Pandora.com, for example, had similar problems getting initial traction, but stuck it out long enough to get over the hump (thanks in large part to iOS and Android), and are now one of the hot 'new' things.

Sometimes I think you can kill promising products too quickly in an attempt to stick with 'fail early/fail often'.

  • gaiusparx  16 years ago

    Feel the same about killing it too soon. But then Google is Google and probably judge success in adoption rate base on the results with Gmail and Chrome.

    My guess is there is an up coming project (Google Me?) that shares some similarity with Wave but is targeting the friends&family group rather than workgroup. They probably will not outsource Wave as some of its tech will find its way to this upcoming project.

nl  16 years ago

I like the fail fast strategy too.

But Buzz is great! What don't you like about it?

mkramlich  16 years ago

The complement of Release Early/Often is probably Kill Early/Often.

EDIT: spelling fixed, thanks!

  • frossie  16 years ago

    You know what the complement of Kill Early/Often is? It's me never letting my shop use a new Google product ever again.

    People invest time in adopting these technologies. Sure, with a little startup you take into account the fact that they might not be able to survive, but with Google you think hey, okay, let's use this thing. And you start developing your process around it. And then you get burned when it gets dropped with "Oh well we lost interest, okay we love you, bye bye!".

    So today, my guys would have been better off sticking with their lousy wiki that having switched to Wave (despite the fact that they liked it and felt it increased their productivity - personally, I never warmed up to it).

    Fool me once...

    • swombat  16 years ago

      Yep, same here. I gave a friggen' talk about Wave at a TechCrunch event. I used it. I wrote an article about it. Inc.com wrote a "personal viewpoint" column where they presented me as a Wave supporter.

      Google just lost all credibility with me as an early adopter. From now on, I'll wait 2 years before I start supporting a new Google product, since they apparently have no staying power.

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    • mkramlich  16 years ago

      The risk of that happening was obvious to me and probably others as well. Heck, whenever you have a dependency on some external service there's a risk that service or provider could go away. Provide the service yourself, or scratch that itch another way, and you'll be immune to that risk. They didn't force you to use Wave, and in fact they were nice enough to let you use it for free, so I don't see what grounds you have to complain about it going away.

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