Comment by eszed
2 years ago
I used it for a couple of theatre projects, and thought it was great. The multi-media sharing was like nothing else at the time, and the threaded discussions worked well. I don't remember the details, but I think we had to stop because everyone I was working with had collectively run out of invites and Google wouldn't give us any more. (And by "wouldn't" I mean "completely ignored emails to their 'user feedback' address", which seemed to be the only way to contact support for the project.) I was, and still slightly am, disappointed that it went away.
A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project. We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with blank looks.
There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme youthfulness.
I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
What year was this focus group?
Oh, geeze. Probably 2018? I'm sure I'm getting the titles, and possibly seniority, of the Dropbox folks there wrong. They might have just been low-level flacks. All I can tell you - hand on heart - is that I mentioned Wave at least twice in different groups, as a point of (favorable) comparison, and they disclaimed knowledge. Either they were genuinely ignorant, or had been instructed for some reason to play dumb.
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.