Google Kills Wave

<i>Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.</i><p>Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a <i>consumer</i> product, à la Facebook?<p>Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for <i>corporate</i> communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email.<p>Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does.<p>----<p>PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network.<p>PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components.<p>PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.

It failed because it was completely invisible.<p>Facebook spams your inbox. They <i>make sure</i> you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc).<p>With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out <i>now</i>. What kind of a communication tool is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring.<p>The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had actually <i>notified</i> users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.<p>Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.

Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did.<p>So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers.<p>I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.

I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015</a>

This really makes me sad. I work in media, and I have found that the collaborative aspects of Wave really made that process easier. I scored an entire film earlier this year, and the producers and I only used Wave as our collaboration space. It was <i>beautiful</i>. Keeping track of various versions of each cue was easily 10x easier than my usual mode (email/FTP/Skype/Phone/etc).<p>We started off with a collaborative list of every cue needed during the first run through, and then let that list grow bigger and bigger with inline replys. Wave's built-in media features meant that I could paste mp3's into the space and let the filmmakers hear my work immediately, and then download the file to put into the project. This meant that when it came time to FTP the big, uncompressed files, it was <i>only</i> the finals, which made things a <i>lot</i> easier.<p>Likewise, collaborating with temp music was a breeze-- the filmmakers even scored a few sections of the film with temp music and then put the video right into the conversation. (No more folders full of giant quicktime files with different scores).<p>I know that I'm going to miss that experience. Oh well. Perhaps someone will take the open-source'd code from Google and build a better product.<p>I'm not holding my breath.

I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over.<p>I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company chain email threads from hell forever now.

That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it out.<p>Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted?<p>edit: would be nice if they open sourced the code.

It seems that at their scale, Google doesn't bother to (is unable to?) evolve individual products, rather they pivot by launching and killing entire projects.<p>The same thing happened with Google's 3D world product, Lively, and the following comparison of Lively with IMVU by Eric Ries is pertinent:<p><i>"By the time they [Google] actually managed to launch something, they were building the product that we had already discovered was not the right product 100 iterations ago.<p>"But they launched it with such high fanfare and expectations; they were so convinced they got it right, that it was actually the mismatch between the expectations that Google--one of the most public companies in the world--put behind this product, and then its pathetic results...<p>"The product wasn't a bad product and it's not like nobody wanted to use it (of course they wanted to use it for stuff that embarrassed Google) but it was the mismatch that really caused them to have to pull it; it was very embarrassing for them...<p>"Even after they launched they really didn't give it enough time to learn and iterate because they had set the wrong expectations, a classic big-company [inaudible]."</i><p>[<a href="http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup" rel="nofollow">http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup</a> -- starting at 6:35 in the audio]

From last year...<p>"Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?"<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354</a>

The problem with useradoption of wave largely came from their invite-only strategy. It's a social tool that requires my friends to have an account for it to be of any use. If they don't have invites and can't join it's useless.<p>It's amazing that Google didn't see this.

Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that.<p>I really hope Buzz is next.

Does anyone else here think that Etherpad could have been more successful than Google Wave?

That was fast. I remember watching the announcement (in person) and wondering who it was really meant for. At the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem.<p>What I <i>did</i> really like was the work they'd done on change-set propagation. Don't have a link to the session on hand, but it was quite interesting.

Honestly I'm amazed by how unanimously friendly Hacker News (and Reddit) are to Wave.<p>It was the anti-suckless - overengineered, XML and web-based, anti-privacy, pampering users instead of educating them (e.g. in a corporate environment, using a VCS together with IRC is a much better way to exchange information). I would've expected at least one contrary voice somewhere :)<p>I say good riddance.

It's a nice case study of too much engineering and too much technology, with far too many unnecessary features to start with, with too much of a roll-out (the basic feature demo took over 45 minutes) to too few people without nearly enough thought into actual use cases of a rather complex piece of software that simply didn't perform that well in real world scenarios.<p>"What's a Wave?" - should be answerable in a couple of sentences, I don't think it ever achieved that level of refinement before being put out into the world.<p>Even though the basic idea was great, performance of the software in-browser has never been that great, server performance was problematic, especially when waves became too long, no export option of collaborate waves to documents, no real integration with email. Plus it was hard to organize waves. After it went pseudo-public nothing really new happened to it and old weird problems like the funky scrollbar were never addressed.<p>That being said, I've used it on a number of projects, a couple quite big six-month ordeals, and found it an amazing collaborative environment if you disciplined your team a bit and organized things well at the start of the project.<p>The concept, combining several, different, modes of communication in one environment is pretty sound actually, I just think that the modes were combined a little too singularly. Certain things like real-time chat and document collaboration are fundamentally different things that should have been relegated to different parts of the interface rather than jammed into one place.<p>"But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." Duh, the rollout was rather botched and given what I think I've detailed it's no wonder.<p>"What is Wave" should have been "a document collaboration tool with real-time side-channel chat and group email" would have been better for the use-cases my group fell into.<p>What I was really excited about, and what never seemed to materialize in terms of a release from Google, was that ability to run my own Wave server and federate with other Wave servers. <i>That's</i> what I wanted, and what never happened.

What suprises me is the short lifespan of the product to the public before killing it. While some of us may have had Wave invites for a while, it has been only been open to the public for less then 3 months.

I liked it, just didn't like the interface. I was an early adopter and very excited about the protocol. When I was looking at it, there wasn't enough client specification to bother working on an alternative client (ie: emacs). Hopefully that has changed (or will change before Google drops support).<p>I found it really useful for collaborating with multiple parties. It allowed us to work on a document and keep the conversation all in one place yet clearly separated. Sometimes email can make that distinction difficult or unclear.<p>At least it's not entirely closed source. :)

Wave was simply over-developed internally, and by the time it was released it had evolved an esoteric, private feature set and interface that had suited the Google beta testers. I for one was simply bewildered by the interface and found it difficult to incorporate into my workflow.

I wanted to like wave. It just always seemed like a solution looking for a problem.

Is it just me or is the source not easily discoverable? I found the wave protocol sources, but i can't really find the individual components. If anyone could point me to the right repo it would be much appreciated!

I guess my new wave client <a href="http://micro-wave.appspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://micro-wave.appspot.com</a> is a little more dead.

Given there seems to be real demand for this product, it may well be an opportunity for a startup to build a competitor.

If Wave was launched with the Gmail integration of Buzz I think we would be discussing a completely different outcome.

You can't make people solve problems they don't have. If Google failed with the Hype Winds at their backs, then I doubt anybody can do it.

That sucks, we left basecamp/campfire for Google Wave and it was a really good fit for us (collaborative work with a distributed team).

I said it before and I'll say it again: wave solved all of the wrong (easy) problems of communication and failed to tackle any of the hard problems. The result was a highly polished mashup of existing communication forms based on cutting edge technology that made for an excellent demo but a very poor (or at best niche) product. See also: the Segway.<p>P.S. Re: hard vs. easy problems: Wave tackled some hard challenges in the implementation space, which I think may have led the engineers into thinking they were building something innovative and worthwhile. However, the important bit is whether or not you've actually solved anything in the problem space.

Wave may have been an idea whose time is yet to come.<p>When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it.<p>This was mostly because I was working in a company where getting people to document was enough of a difficulty without introducing new software. If I'd worked somewhere with a bunch of early-adopters, it would have been a fantastic tool.<p>On the other hand, Wave seems like a tool that almost replicates all of the benefits of being in the same room as someone. I don't think there's a better way to do a distributed workplace. (Of course, I haven't tried.)

I don't think Wave as a product failed. I think it failed as a product Google imagined/wanted it to be. They expected Wave to replace the way we use email. I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now, after the fact. The tech was cool and useful but changing consumers habits and especially on something like communication is very very hard. So I am not really surprised it did not get adoption. I agree with some of the comments below that if it was integrated tightly within Gmail, it would worked better and PERHAPS it would helped more users try it, like it and adopt it ..slowly.

So, that leaves us with 0 popular GWT applications? Or did Google build anything new / ported something old with it?

I think it was grievously hurt by google's slow-start "invite" thing.<p>It was a catch-22. You needed people to collaborate with for it to catch on, but you needed to wait a long time to invite people.

When more people say "I tried it, haven't really used it though" than "I use it regularly" you know your product has failed.

I wrote this elsewhere; it summarizes my opinion. I'll just add that, in addition to the below, Google also simply needs to allow sufficient time for such a new paradigm (albeit an amalgam of many separate, older, established paradigms) to gain adoption.<p>--<p>I find this quite disappointing. Wave as a concept -- and apparently its underlying implementation -- is brilliant. It pretty much exactly fixes a number of significant barriers I've repeatedly, persistently encountered in professional, collaborative communication.<p>However, in a fashion that's becoming all too typical for Google, the user interface was spartan and disjointed to the point of outright sucking for anyone who was not an "uebergeek" already at least passingly familiar with the paradigms they were using.<p>Just like with their Android Nexus phone: They didn't need to improve the technology further as much as they needed to make it usable for the common user. In the phone's case, that meant real customer support. In Wave's case, that meant a meaningful, obvious user interface and much less spartan documentation, including non-linear textual references and not just so many overcute, time-consuming, and shared-environment-adverse videos many of which were broken into frustratingly small snippets. The videos did, I suppose, demonstrate the dynamic interface better than a bunch of text and static pictures might, but then this was in significant part the fault of the interface that gave no visual indicators of what to click or drag, much less what doing so would accomplish.<p>Google really should give Wave more time, and devote a small cadre of staff to fixing the UI, and another small cadre of staff to some coherent, consistent promotion and public training/documentation. Once people grasp what it can do and how to do it in a quick, intuitive fashion, I argue they would have users aplenty. They've already added it as a beta feature to their Google Apps online office software suite. That crowd is ripe for adoption, if adoption is made straightforward.

Isn't it obvious that the #1 reason wave failed was because it wasn't backwards compatible with email? If I could I have received all my email over wave, as well as new waves, I would have started using it immediately. But if its separate, I have to add yet <i>another</i> thing to check to my life? No thanks.

Building community needs evangelizing it, building brand ambassadors out of your users and most important "listening to your users closely". One needs to set up a mode of direct conversation. This comes naturally when you start small like twitter or youtube.<p>When you have few million user base ready to consume whatever you advertise on gmail or search - you are trying to buy out of old rewards. Worse users are non-forgiving and expectations are much high.<p>So it sounds like a big company problem. But it really isn't. Yahoo does it really well with yahoo answers. There is even today a high response rate from yahoo team through "Ask Mike"<p>Google should probably consider small teams within. Provide all the support through tech and hardware but let the teams launch these products on their own and grow the userbase naturally focusing on service too along with the product.

Google put absolutely 0 muscle behind this product. Android got front page placement on Google and it has now overtaken iPhone. They either didn't truly believe in Wave or the marketing team just made a huge gaffe by not even making a half ass attempt to push this product to the consumer world.

Microsoft Bobs. Google Waves.

i don't get which problem was it solving. is it cool that they've introduced character-by-character typing? well, kinda.. but is it useful at all?<p>it's also cool (for someone) that it looks like a desktop app, but is it needed? it's maybe cool that i have all my contacts from gmail there, but do i need this? i mean i don't even get why would i think of my gmail as a social network, it's my inbox, and it's fine for what it does.<p>I mean its hard not to appreciate people trying to innovate, but it actually has to solve some sort of problem.. or maybe it's just me not getting the concept (however it's still so much more interesting than all these buzz, rule.fm etc)

Google needs to focus on their core competency which is search. Instead of competing with everyone they should find ways to integrate their search engine into everything. It boggles my mind we don't integrate Google search into everything like we do with the Twitter API. If they continually strive for second place in every category they may one day find themselves second in search as well. Wave is just another lesson in the long string of failures they will continue to produced until they get back to what made them great in the first place.

unfortunate. it was a good product, for the right market, but it was overhyped and it underdelivered.

I used Google wave for feature/ticket tracking. The only thing I could fault it for was the wacky interface which didn't always work correctly. It was nice to have a hosted, free ticket tracking app that did just enough to get by for that purpose (for personal use I don't need anything as complicated as Redmine, Trak, or Bugzilla; don't have much desire to host my own app; and I'm too cheap to pay someone to host something I could do myself).<p>Now I'll have to move all of that state somewhere else.

Based on the initial reactions to the first Google Wave demonstration by a few non-tech friends of mine I thought Google Wave might gain the necessary product adoption and momentum. I erred and so did many other folks.<p>I applaud Google for their willingness to stop investing precious development resources in something that looked like the next big thing but turned out to be a great product without consumer approval.

It was time. That´s true that "You can't make people solve problems they don't have". But the idea was excellent,maybe later can work.

That is sad - I have written a few Wave Robots and wrote an article on Wave. I never thought of it as a user-facing system as-is, but instead liked it as a development platform. I probably invested a little less than 80 hours playing with Wave and writing Robots, and I think it was time fairly well spent, even if Wave is going away.

Excellent. Wave was made using obsolete technology and some wrong choices made it in regarding push vs. pull, distribution, modularity, "social mediafication" and encryption among other things.<p>There were some good things about it, and Hopefully we will now see some real contenders rise up to tackle the Future of Communication(tm).<p>Preferrably not from Google. Sorry.

This was Wave's failure: One year after release (and having never used it), I still don't really know what it does.

Can't they just stop improving it and keep it running? It's not like they need to save their server resources.

I think Wave is a creative and full of effort generalization of a basic idea: adding something to GMail to promote online work coordination and cooperation. They went way too far and they realized it. I would, istread of throwing everything away, rework the concept and see what can come out.

Understandable, but still a shame.<p>We've got a wave going with about 14 people planning our trips to Ruby Kaigi in a few weeks. It's working really well and has definitely provided value that would be tricky to find elsewhere.<p>Could Wave have worked better if it targeted a vertical? Or is that not how Google does things?

Is this the same thing as Buzz?<p>If I want to 'connect' with friends, I have Facebook, and if I want to im work colleagues, I have Yahoo and MSN.<p>For document collaboration I have email for non-realtime, Google Docs for near and actual real-time.<p>I have a hard time seeing where my workflow needs any more collaboration tools.

I wonder if the team can continue working on an open source implementation in their 20% time.

I think the reason for Wave's failure is simpler than most posts here suggest. Wave was just way too complicated as an end user tool. It is a technology wanting to be an application. I hope it can live on as a technology underlying real applications.

They should really reprint this shirt, in light of this announcement, for hipsters to wear.<p><a href="http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts-sale/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts...</a>

Wave was a bit too sci-fi. A bit too ahead of its time maybe. Maybe it's best if the technology is split up and spoon-fed to the general population ... that way people can get a taste. I think change needs to be incremental.

That's a shame. I'd have used it if other friends and colleagues adopted it, it was pretty good at what it did. I think the issue was that it didn't solve any big enough problems for people to encourage them to get on.

Everything that distracts from Google Me is obviously being shut down.

A year is really short to get a revolutionary way of working to catch on. Why give up so easily? Maybe they couldn't figure out a working business model for this one.

This makes me feel a little better about the time when I sat on tons of invites &#38; never really got around to using Wave. I'm one of those who never grokked wave.

Google also wanted it to be tool for all the enterprise, what will happen to other implementation of Google wave for enterprises, for example say Novel's pulse?

I was thinking about this recently: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223</a>

google wave is dead because of google.<p>google provided limited accounts and google wave requests was being sold, so the hype got created.<p>overcommit and underdelivery, 2009 was not 2004, gmail style launch for wave was the first nail in the coffin<p>though you have your account, your friends dont, you were waiting alone, it was not the realtime communications I expected. what do I do, leave google wave, this has happened with so many people whom I know.

I guess my new wave client is even more dead. <a href="http://micro-wave.appspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://micro-wave.appspot.com</a>

innovative technology feels like art sometimes, it should exist for the sake of it. "L'art pour l'art", Innovation for innovation!

I wonder how much pressure for canceling such an ambitious product came from people invested in the Apps team?

This was a product worthy of being spun out into a standalone company, free to pitch at the corporate market

They blew it big time by hyping it for RPGs, which never went anywhere.<p>Get the RPGers on board, perhaps, and you can succeed.

to me it seems that google-wave could not gather enough user adoption <i>precisely</i> because it was invite only. gmail could get away with it, because the _nature_ of email 'collaboration' (sic) doesn't mandate both endpoints to be gmail.<p>whatever the reason, kind of sad anyways.

I think adobe connect is the way to go, as far as corporate collaboration tools.

Ouch Etherpad guys!<p>Perhaps Google is coming out with WaveDocs (wave integrated google docs) soon?

in two words : It was a good idea, but badly implemented. I'm not telling I would have done a better job than their engineers, but just have a look at the slow interface they made, and you will get my point..

To tell you the truth I anticipated this when Google first launched it.

"See my comments in RED" still rocks.

oh no but at least I can cross checkout google wave in detail from my todo......

Ouch!

long live the Wave.<p>the time is right for a New Wave startup

The idea is excellent, the fail is the lack of 'product'. They should distribute Wave modules that every wordpress or phpbb user can install on their blogs and hook into their own communities... and then Wave will take off.

Crap. How can I host my own?

yet another hint that google have seen its better days..