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Gerrit Eicker 07:13 on 5. August 2010 Permalink
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  Gerrit Eicker 07:15 on 5. August 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Google: “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily ‘liberate’ their content from Wave. – Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

  TC: “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.”

  VB: “The announcement isn’t a huge surprise, given the tepid response to Wave as a product (as opposed to the hype that greeted its announcement). … Google has cancelled plenty of products before, but this feels like a particular letdown because it had built up Wave so much. … Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra described Wave as reinventing email, reinventing document collaboration, even reinventing communication. That kind of ambitious talk swept along a lot of fans (including me), but it crashed against the reality of Wave’s early product, which was both buggy and difficult to understand.”

  SEL: “Google could potentially have simplified Wave and scaled it back, or focused it on fewer core features. And Google also probably needed to do some more outreach and education around the product. – Google has historically been reluctant to favor products or promote them, preferring instead to let them sink or swim on their own. Google’s philosophy surrounding new products is not unlike what happens when sea turtles hatch on the beach: those that gain adoption organically make it back to the water and live. Those that cannot or are intercepted by predators don’t. – Google Wave obviously didn’t make it back into the sea.”

  NYT: “Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked. Wave also has several competitors, ranging from Salesforce’s Chatter to Jive. – One of Wave’s major ideas – that the browser is replacing the desktop computer as the center of people’s computing lives – lives on at Google and is the central tenet of its Web-based Chrome operating system.”

  RWW: “Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don’t call it an ’email-killer’ (and you shouldn’t) then you’d have to call it a ‘product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration.’ That’s daunting and proved accessible to too few people. Still, with a rumored 100 Google engineers working on Wave to date, a call from Google for more engineering collaboration less than a month ago, and such high hopes – it’s a bit of a shock to see it come to an end. … Proponents of the service say it wasn’t that complicated and was remarkably powerful. Maybe this failure should be chalked up as another example of how Google ‘doesn’t get social’ in terms of user experience or successful evangelism. After an immediate explosion of hype, it never felt like Google was really trying very hard with Wave.”

  TC: “When BBC reporter Maggie Shiels asked about the reasons behind the product’s demise, Schmidt noted that Google liked the UI and a lot of the technology behind the product, but it simply to take off. ‘We try things,’ [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] said. ‘Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,’ he continued.”

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  Gerrit Eicker 10:21 on 5. August 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Some additional thoughts from a conversation with Sam Liban (@FlightMemory):

  @eicker “I think RWW is right: ‘Google ‘doesn’t get social’ in terms of user experience or successful evangelism’.”
  @FlightMemory “Actually, the ‘social’ aspect (Orkut) is really a bug for Google. Maybe its just the size? But Wave was/is a neat tool. Well…”
  @eicker “Without being arrogant: Wave was a great tool for us. But Wave has never been a great tool for ‘regular onliners’. Not yet. – To understand the power of Wave, you need deep understanding of concepts like wikis, IM, ‘new communications’. – Google designed a tool for 0.1% of the market. BTW: Google Buzz is facing the same problem. – And the core problem: Google is really, really bad in marketing and communications.”
  @FlightMemory “Is it not always the case, that there is a gap between early adopters and ‘normal users’? I mean, look at fb, twitter and so forth. – Buzz is a clone. Clones are hard. Wave was innovation, but too high expectations by Google and media? Early adopters loved it.”
  @eicker “True, but it’s not enough to have a great tool and a brilliant GUI. People need a purpose first. A problem the tool can solve. – That’s why you need to have faced the problems of wikis, IMs, eMails first to understand what Wave gives to you.”
  @FlightMemory “Yes, purpose/use-case is important. But some apps develop the use case after they been launched. Could have happened with Wave… – You do remember, Twitter was a txt/sms service at start? :-) Apps can change their purpose once used.”
  @eicker “The purpose is communications. And eMail works *great* for 99% of regular onliners…”
  @Flightmemory “True, but 1% drives the net…”

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  Gerrit Eicker 11:16 on 5. August 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Guardian: “Like most people, you’ve probably heard of [Wave] but not actually tried it, which sums up the problem. What was it? The Wave idea was a centralised communications tool that combined the real-time advantages of Twitter with the aggregation of your email and chat, with collaborative documents too. Easy to dismiss as something too ambitious and far reaching, but perhaps the difficulty in describing its function was its biggest downall. Twitter managed to survive a similar fate (remember that momet of trying to describe it to a non believer?) but Wave was far more ambitious. … I’d file this under ideas that were just a little ahead of their time. With refinement, a clearer proposition and better integration with existing services, it would have stood a better chance. Wave was one stab at tackling our information overload, at providing a central hub for all the information we need to deal with every day. And it will be back, in one form or another.”

  Winer: “Here’s the problem – when I signed on to Wave, I didn’t see anything interesting. It was up to me, the user, to figure out how to sell it. But I didn’t understand what it was, or what its capabilities were, and I was busy, always. Even so I would have put the time in if it looked interesting, but it didn’t. – However, it had another problem. Even if there were incentives to put time into it, and even if I understood how it worked or even what it did, it still wouldn’t have booted up because of the invite-only thing. It’s the same problem every Twitter-would-be or Facebook-like thing has. My friends aren’t here, so who do I communicate with? But with Wave it was even worse because even if I loved Wave and wanted everyone to use it, it was invite-only. So the best evangelist would still have to plead with Google to add all of his workgroup members to the invite list.“

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  Gerrit Eicker 07:57 on 6. August 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Google’s Graveyard:
  – Answers
  – Audio Ads
  – Browser Sync
  – Catalogs/Catalog Search
  – Co-op (now Custom Search)
  – Deskbar
  – Dodgeball
  – Free Search (then Co-op)
  – Google X
  – Jaiku
  – Joga Bonito
  – Lively
  – Local (now only for Mobile Search)
  – MK-14
  – Music Trends
  – Notebook
  – Page Creator (now Sites)
  – Personalized Search (now Accounts and Web History)
  – Picasa Hello
  – Print Ads
  – Public Service Search (redirected to Co-op)
  – SearchMash
  – SearchWiki
  – Shared Stuff
  – Spreadsheets (now Docs)
  – Video
  – Video Player
  – Voice Search (now Voice Local Search)
  – Wave
  – Web Accelerator
  – Writely (now Docs)

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  Google’s Graveyard « Wir sprechen Online. 08:23 on 6. August 2010 Permalink | Reply

  […] Google expands its graveyard for Wave. The core question: what is next? Buzz? http://j.mp/GooglesGraveyard […]

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  Save Google Wave « Wir sprechen Online. 15:15 on 9. August 2010 Permalink | Reply

  […] Do you think that Google Wave should be saved? http://j.mp/bR2zsL #SaveGoogleWave @SaveGoogleWave http://j.mp/WaveOver […]

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  Google Wave Survives: Wave in a Box « Wir sprechen Online. 06:19 on 3. September 2010 Permalink | Reply

  […] Google: We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we have already open sourced. Go Wave in a Box! http://j.mp/alMzSm […]

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  Google Acquisitions « Wir sprechen Online. 19:00 on 21. November 2010 Permalink | Reply

  […] Blodget: Hell, yes, Google should buy Groupon. And Twitter. And Foursquare; http://eicker.at/GoogleAcquisitions […]

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  Apache Wave « Wir sprechen Online. 05:37 on 7. December 2010 Permalink | Reply

  […] Google introduces Apache Wave: Wave in a Box (WIAB) enters the ASF‘s incubator program; http://eicker.at/ApacheWave […]

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  Google’s Graveyard II. « Wir sprechen Online. 08:37 on 4. September 2011 Permalink | Reply

  […] Google once again expands its graveyard: Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Notebook, Sidewiki…; http://eicker.at/GooglesGraveyard […]