Comment by dpcan
16 years ago
Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did.
So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers.
I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.
I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the only provider.
I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver.
It's pure conjecture of course!
It wasn't so much that they lacked infrastructure as that the early versions didn't scale so well.
I got a very early invitation, and it was pretty slow, and got worse as they added more users. They fixed that of course, but it did slow down the roll-out.
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Probably one of their mistakes was not to have interoperability between Wave and Gmail at an early stage. I think they ruled out doing that early on.
I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver.
It's pure conjecture of course!
I was also a lone waver for a long time. I think the same happened to many users, so the way in which it was launched should have been different. However, I don't think that the failure can be blamed entirely upon the launch strategy. Performance of wave was really poor, and as the conversations became longer the refresh rate really dragged.
I think a lesson here for Google is that when they initially launch a product to a small number of users, they should really try to encourage the early adopters and make sure that they don't end up stranded with no other users to talk to, because those early adopters will become evangelists if they're well treated. Perhaps they should have just kept Wave quiet and then launched it a year later to everyone.
It's didn't help that google's response to user feedback was "you just don't understand it" rather than improving the product.
I mean, we still have to contend with a broken, nonstandard, useless scrollbar in the product.
Completely agree. Whoever planned the launch strategy for Wave should be flogged.
Wave had huge potential. I can't believe Google are so short-sighted as to let it go so quickly, with so little effort.
I get the sense that the launch strategy wasn't flawed as much as no one really understood the real use cases. Without that, no one knew how to properly communicate benefits and target the right users. (I would also guess that they never thought they'd get the level of publicity they got.)
And by the time Wave had had enough testing, they had lost all the early momentum. At some point you've got to choose where you put your effort!
Flogging people for having trouble scaling at Google's size is not nice.
Total agreement here. I was very interested in checking it out, but I wasn't allowed to, in spite of all the publicity? It didn't make me want to go begging for invites, it just made me ignore it.