When Google Wave was first announced I was among the many people who were very excited about the potential.
I realized at the end of July that my Google Wave account had no activity since March and started thinking about why that was. I started writing this article with the intent of describing why I thought Wave hadn't taken off when the cancellation announcement was made. So, after revamping, this is why I believe Wave failed as a product.
It fixes email: Why we were excited in the first place
The only reason the failure of Google Wave is interesting is because of how much excitement it generated when announced. When I first saw the Wave video it demonstrated what seemed like viable solutions to some of the major problems with email:
- I can fix typos, mistakes and even factual errors after a message is sent.
- There is excellent threading and management of replies.
- People can join the conversation and stay joined. People can be added that were inadvertently left off the original invite list and immediately join the conversation.
- Attachments are only sent once and then are always available. No digging through my archive for the original message and attachments.
- Email can't switch to real-time. Wave is real-time. I often leave email and IM somebody when the emails are flying fast.
The promise of improving email was an elixir and we all waited to drink with bated breath.
It's not email: Why it failed
It solves some of the problems with email by eliminating email, but then introduced a whole new set of problems which broke a whole bunch of things that email fixes!
My Head Hurts
One of the coolest superhero powers is mind reading. It's also one of those superhero powers that would never work in real life. Having this power would make simple things like going to the mall a hell on earth; the thought noise of hundreds of insipid teenage shoppers, bored store clerks, shoplifters, flirting couples, etc. would drive you mad.
This is Wave in a nutshell. If it did replace email and IM, my inbox would be a non-stop cacophony of line noise; PM's composing emails, proposals being written, the first half of a note from my wife about plans for tonight, job applicants responding, friends arranging events, urban legends from my Mom ...
And this noise couldn't be ignored like twitter. Half of those responses would be information I was waiting on.
HR Hates Me Now
Depending upon your communication style Wave could be disastrous. I tend to type messages and then edit them; or think better of some ill advised comment and delete them entirely. In Wave I'd be either inadvertently insulting or look like a moron until I corrected my messages.
Like laws and sausages; nobody should see how my email and IM messages are made.
Why Am I Using this Again?
My entire dev team created accounts and we played with it for a couple of days but then haven't used it in a couple of months. We are heavy users of IM, Yammer and Email but couldn't really see a use for Wave.
Communication tends to take two forms: quick comments/questions with a quick follow-up or deliberately worded communications. We have IM and Yammer for the first and email for the second. Wave is a poor substitute for IM and is, if you don't need real-time email, a closed network email system.
Real-time collaboration is something you do rarely and it's almost always a document, a design or code. Wave doesn't help with design (mostly a white board activity) or code (mostly a pair programming activity). We have Google Docs for real-time document collaboration now.
Wave promised to merge IM and Email but that didn't really pan out. You still need IM after all.
Spam
As somebody who worked in the Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam industry for years my first thought was "Cool, an entirely new vector for spam and viruses." Sure enough, a Spam button appeared soon after. In a closed environment.
All Those Technical Problems
The slow, uneven roll out meant that whenever you finally got access to Wave, your friends were either bored with it already or were stuck waiting on Beta invites. Contrast this with Gmail where I got an early beta and then immediately got five invites that also worked immediately. Also, with Gmail, I was able to test it using other email services. I applied for developer preview access which I didn't get, then had 2 beta invites sent to me that never arrived and finally got access on the 3rd beta invite in February of this year. That's not the way to build ground swell support.
There are a large number of user interface issues that exist in Wave that make it unsuitable for it's primary purpose of real-time communications. The way everything jumps around if more than one person is editing at a time, selecting the section you want to edit is error prone and you will often miss; it's more like a game of TF2 than an editor. The new versions of the UI were better but it's kind of moot now.
The versioning system is terrible; rollback is not a viable versioning mechanism.
It's a closed system. The only use I could see for Wave is taking an email Exchange "real-time". Since it's not email this feature is not even available.
No data import or export. I've just collaborated with a co-worker and come up with a great new idea; now how do I get that stream of data into a Word document to send to a VC to make us all rich? I can't.
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