Comment by Zak
16 years ago
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.
So why not have another rollout? Sponsor some contests? Hold more demos in tech conferences? Build a Wave-to-Twitter gateway? Build a demo site which gives every HN article it's own wavelet, or whatever?
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!