Why Wave Failed 350
Florian Wardell submitted a little discussion piece about Why Wave Failed. He blames marketing and the staged rollout. Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly. Had I been able to read my regular mail in the same UI, I might have been tempted to use it more.
I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever the reason for Wave’s failure is, the fact remains: There are two types of people, the ones that love Wave, and the ones that don’t know what it is.
Well, I guess I don't exist then. I tried Wave, I understand that it's supposed to be a collaboration tool more than just a glorified IM Client. And I don't love it -- I don't hate it, either. If it cost money I would hate it. But since it's open source and free I kind of view it as a solution to a problem I don't have. My coworkers and I played around with it for a day, noticed some tiny problems with arrival times of messages and the like (things that would probably be ironed out) but after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.
Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly.
Well, to counter that, I personally found it to be too confusing and not intuitive enough. Adding in my e-mail would have just made it an indiscernible mess. GMail is already busy enough, I'm not going to be able to consume that inside Wave. Doing one thing really well is often more valuable to me than doing a lot of things really well and trying to cram them into one experience ... this UI bloat really wears on me.
Meanwhile, we’ll have to include Wave to Google’s increasing list flops: The Nexus One, Google Answers, Google Checkout, Google Viewer, the Knol, Orkut, Wave, and Buzz.
Fail early, fail often, right? I feel bad for Novel's Pulse and SAP's Cloudave which I think were built up to interact with Wave but at the same time I don't think it was forced on them nor do either of them have to stop working on that product if Google is dropping out of the game (open source is great!). Google's failures are far less painful to me than another company's failures so I'll gladly tolerate them ... maybe even appreciate them because they'll get something right one of these days (look at Android going nuts [slashdot.org]).
I blame (the lack of) security options (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Wave was only useful to me if I could trust 100% of the participants in the Wave. Yes, yes, there is a roll-back to undo damage. Not good enough.
If I had a group of Internet participants, that absolutely wasn't the case. There was no in-between. Either you trusted someone and they could do almost anything, or you didn't. And damage was extremely easy to do. There wasn't anything else that I could find, like moderator pre-approval.
Public groups were too much trouble under Google wave. A group of students collaborating on a private assignment? Not so much.
Failed because it was stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
When I first saw reports and demos of Wave, my reaction was basically "wtf is this crap?" When some of the younger people at my last job (web hosting company) started using it and I saw it "in action," that basically just solidified my initial impression. I couldn't figure out what it was really for (in a "solution to a problem" sense) or why I would want to use it.
It seems to be just an extreme conclusion of an ADHD society. It gives too much too quickly, all jumbled up and mixed together. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like my IM being separate from my email, and maybe its OK to use LDAP to pre-populate my contacts, but that's just about where I draw the line.
I suspect that I'm far from being the only person who also though Wave was pretty much just the worst idea ever and that using it would cause brain hemorrhages. No amount of marketing or alternate release schedules is going to make up for the fact that Wave was just insanely stupid and never should have seen the light of day in the first place.
Tag this story good riddance and be done with it.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bottom line for me was that it was far to slow.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, eldavojohn, I knew what it was and tried and never thought of a reason why I would want to spend time trying it again. I didn't even play around with it for a day ... maybe 15 minutes, got bored, moved on, never looked back.
I suspect most people who tried it did similarly.
The thing about putting Gmail inside it is that then it might have given someone a reason to use it. As it stood, most people had no reason to use it.
It was a busy and complicated solution to a problem almost no one had.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Subliminal messaging (Score:5, Interesting)
Insightful is the fact that the comment gets moderated according to it's first word. Let's see if this works...
Interesting, your theory appears correct.
Re:It's simple: Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried it once.
It seemed to interact horrifically with Flashblock - the windows just did nothing, I couldn't view any of the tutorials, IIRC I couldn't even click on half of the links. It basically looked like a bunch of funkily cut up frames.
I whitelisted the Wave website (I assumed it was the root of whatever page I was looking at right then) and it still didn't work. I wasn't about to disable Flashblock for some website that didn't do anything and whose purpose I honestly didn't understand, so I said "screw this" and looked at pictures of cats with bad grammar.
The moral of this story? Cats are funny. Oh and also don't be an idiot and use Flash for every little thing.
Wasn't even an effective IM to start... (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest problem was that it was more of a "message board" than an "instant messenger". The major failing was that it was indeed built into the web browser. It wasn't the type of IM that would give you a pop-up when someone said something. So for that, we used other IMs (Crappy Microsoft one, I think) - in my current company, we use Skype a lot.
No one had the discipline, temperate, or screen real estate to devote to wave - when what we really needed it for was occasional real-time conversations with a large dispersed group.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just recently, I was trying to write code (Matlab code, and the resulting academic paper in LaTeX) with someone on the other end of the continent, so we gave Wave a try. Within minutes I realised that it's useless even for this, the task it was seemingly built for.
The reason: It's a sandbox. If you write code, you like to be able to save it, and compile it. To do either of the two you have to, literally, select, copy and paste your code from the wave into your IDE / text editor / local file system. That of course breaks the whole "keep everything in sync in one place in the cloud" idea.
So I guess there is one, and only one use case for wave: If you want to write unformatted text in collaboration with others, for the sole purpose of notetaking and, eventually, printing it on a piece of scrap paper. I guess there are not that many people out there in the world who actually need this sort of functionality. For everyone else, Wave is a hassle.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait... [sourceforge.net]
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Mozilla's Bespin (Score:4, Interesting)
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait... [sourceforge.net]
DancesWithBlowTorch, keep an eye on Mozilla's Bespin [mozillalabs.com]. I've used the very basic skeleton project they had and think they're on track but it's coming along [slashdot.org] and will hopefully firm up once HTML5 support and standards become common place. I don't know how fluid it will become with real time updates but imagine editing your code anytime from any browser that is HTML 5 compliant and your collaborators seeing that. Not sure how many languages they plan on incorporating but when it's done, your source will exist and be compiled in the cloud. Maybe not ideal for a business but for open source collaboration ... really neat!
SSDD (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy, but I've been on the internet since the days when the most useful protocol was telnet, and I thought the same thing as you did when I saw wave. In fact, I tried asking a bunch of much younger people about it, and the best answer I got was that "it allows you to collaborate".
Q: "better than a shared whiteboard and phone call?" ."
A: "well, no . .
Q: "How do you keep everybody from trashing the design with their own agendas?"
A: "You can roll back"
That's the solution? To restore from a backup and waste everybody's time?
While Wave was definitely cool, and I don't fault Google for releasing it (I love playing with new stuff), it bugs the crap out of me that Every New Thing gets a fresh round of "buzz" and internet cheer-leading whether or not it's better than or even as good as what we already have.
it's kinda like vim (Score:3, Interesting)
Wave was confusing, and it demanded a big shift in thinking up front -- sort of like vim. You couldn't just add little changes into your workflow incrementally. On top of that, you had to have someone else to do it with. It was hard to be a geeky guy who was interested, and willing to climb the learning curve on your own.
So imagine you use a typical gui screen editor. And you want to learn vim. And the only way you can move forward is if you find someone else who's willing to use vim with you while you learn.
Most people just aren't going to do it.
Incremental gradual change is easier for people.
Re:Subliminal messaging (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting is the fact that your little er experiment actually seems to work
Maybe that was part of Google wave's problem... no decent way to moderate it... also, "playback" and revision history, some of Google waves features, were a performance issue.
I remember seeing a public wave where some user had created hundreds of thousands of revisions, such that the playback and slidebar were unusable.
They should have used some Google magic to help make it scale more fluidly and have fewer performance issues on the client, so it would actually be usable with large waves.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with Wave was that it was an invite only service which didn't interoperate with anything that had an established install base. Likewise, when I logged in the couple times I have, I couldn't figure out what it was really for.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Meetings. The kind you would traditionally hold face to face with a group of people and record minutes. In the specific case I was referring to, allowing the general public to view and perhaps even join in to specific discussions would have been an added bonus.
I realize you can accomplish the same with a number of individual technologies, but Wave brought it all together and made it easy for the average person to use.
Re:Already? (Score:3, Interesting)