Comment by orangecat
16 years ago
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.
If you had an apps account, you could have requested Google Wave. We got it a while ago.
Ironically, Google just enabled multiple sign-ons, but I'm not sure it would have helped.
There's too much tied to my GMail account already.