Comment by m104
16 years ago
You're right: completely invisible. Wave would have been so cool if Google had plopped it right on top of Gmail, like Gchat and Buzz. Our Wave-enabled contacts would have gotten their messages as waves, seamlessly, and non-Wave contacts would have continued to receive regular emails. Wave collaboration could have been supported with notification emails to non-Wave contacts, like "we're editing this on Wave, so click here {...} to join in." Best of all, every Gmail user would have been upgraded to Wave... I thought that was supposed to be the plan! What a waste.
I'd like to ask one of the top Googlers just what they were thinking by positioning Wave as a replacement to email, chat, and online collaboration and NOT integrating those services into Wave itself. IPv4 to IPv6, hello! No migration plan means no migration. Email support means being able to use Wave and email at the same time; not having to choose.
Still trying to wrap my head around this, but at this point I'm not sure what's worse: a) Planning, developing, implementing, marketing, and supporting Wave as communications platform without regards to Gmail, Gchat, and Buzz or b) Axing Wave before trying to add Gmail, Gchat, and Buzz support
I think there wouldn't have been a negative response to dropping Wave into GMail either. Wave was this cool new thing, and arguably an extension of mail, it would have made sense. COmpare that to Buzz where it was obvious they were just trying to compete against Twitter and leverage their existing user base.
Similarly, there should have been a push to build more Wave clients. The google default one kinda sucked. I personally would have just like a Wave client built into Thunderbird that would keep me up-to-date on my half dozen mailboxes AND my Wave accounts at the same time.