
Why did Google feel that Google Wave was a good product? - rpsubhub
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-feel-that-Google-Wave-was-a-good-product/answers/380212
======
cletus
To me, Wave failed because it wasn't a product. It was an engineering
exercise. There was a lot of interesting technology in Wave (eg the Wave
protocol itself, federated servers).

But what problem did it solve?

No one really seemed able to answer that.

When I looked at Wave I saw a set of primitives from which you could build
email, IM, Twitter or any other number of communication mediums. The problem
is that people could already do all of those things elsewhere. Did Wave make
it easier? If it did, it might've stood a fighting chance. But it didn't. The
UI was complicated. On most browsers it was slow.

Part of what made Google the search behemoth that it is (apart from the
obvious algorithmic improvements over what came before it) was the simplicity
of it. It was the simplest of pages (compared the shotgun portals of Yahoo and
the like) with a giant text box. Anyone could look at it and know what to do.
What's more it was _fast_.

So I would take Wave as an object lesson in what happens when you seek to
solve an interesting engineering problem rather than build a product.

~~~
elehack
For me, Wave had one very strong use case: collaboration and discussion
intended to result in a persistent document. Forums, mailing lists, e-mail,
etc. are great for discussion, but they are generally ephemeral. Documents are
persistent, and with Google Docs can be created collaboratively, but the
communication channels around them are weak. You're limited to distracting in-
document text, limited comments, or entirely out-of-band communication e.g.
e-mail. With Wave you could have the document, editable by anyone, and embed
discussion in it and around it. You can discuss a point, updating the base
document as discussion converges. It's a brilliant medium for group
brainstorming and drafting.

That use case alone is enough to make me miss it.

~~~
pestaa
While I definitely agree this would have worked as a great collaboration tool,
anyone I tried it with just did not get it, and we ended up using it as a
I'm-seeing-what-you're-typing chat box.

------
tseabrooks
Despite the hype... I don't think Wave failed. I blame all of 'us' (where 'us'
is defined as alpha geeks, silicon valley startup folks, techies, etc) for
this misrepresentation. We all this products must be wildly successful with
millions of users or it has failed... we tend to see failure and success as
this very black and white / binary thing... but it's not.

Google is probably discontinuing use of Wave because it didn't live up to
their expectations and didn't have as many users as they need it to in order
for it to be viable. If this were created by a smaller company, however, it
could still be considered successful... I haven't been able to find any
numbers on how many active users wave has but I'd guess somewhere around 50k -
100k... For any smaller company that'd be a huge success...

I'm really tired of reading all of the rhetoric that acts as if it's just oh
so obvious that Wave isn't a good product. For 50k users it's a great product
that they love... It doesn't need to have 2 million users to be a good
product... Personally, I think Wave is a BRILLIANT piece of software and I use
it exclusively for communication with my 6-10 close personal friends.

I have one gripe - the mobile interface is terrible... Maybe if this could've
been fixed more people would've used it.

~~~
zaidf
When you market to 100M+ people, you can find 50K-100K people to love almost
any product. That does not make the product good nor a success for the company
that created it.

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pamelafox
I personally opted to join the Wave team because it was the first time that
I'd seen Google try something quite different. Google has many other cool
products, but many of them are online versions of existing desktop tools, or
Google versions of existing online tools. Wave was a unique blend of a variety
of communication tools, and it intrigued me.

In addition, I was in a role where I spent half of my time communicating and
collaborating with different groups, and after failing to be impressed with
existing tools, I was particularly interested in seeing how Wave might make my
role easier. And despite its various flaws, it did indeed make it better.

In the end, I'm happy that I joined the Wave team. It was a really interesting
project to work on and a great learning experience.

~~~
js4all
And that was great, I could feel your enthusiasm from your posts and answers.
They were a big plus for Wave.

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lionhearted
Once I got into it, I liked Wave _a lot_.

The real problem for Wave was that it had a 20-60 minute learning curve,
almost no one I knew was using it, and it was hard to convince people to use
it because of the learning curve and no one else was using it.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Wave is going to be one of those things people talk about for years afterwards
wondering why it failed.

In the end, it probably was two things: 1) Wave didn't fit into some neat
category that people already had about stuff, and 2) Google wanted to own all
the data

~~~
chapel
You are correct about #1 but #2 is way off. Where did you get that assumption?
From everything that was said or done about Wave, it seemed like they have no
problem with having the data be outside of Google's silos. If they wanted to
control it all, why did they want to have it be federated and distributed
using multiple variations of Wave or custom apps that speak the same protocol?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thanks for the clarification.

I contacted the development group at Google and was told the Wave server code
was proprietary and they weren't giving it out. Yes, the _protocol_ was open,
and the idea was that there would be a lot of clients and such that would use
it, but if a team wanted to take the server code as-is and start plugging in
sensitive information? The data couldn't live in-house.

That's why several projects I had decided not to use Wave. Shame, really. I
liked it a lot. I hear that the server will be made available under the Apache
license, so I'm looking forward to that happening.

~~~
sp332
Google's own Wave servers probably plugged in to BigTable and who knows what
other proprietary stuff. So the source code probably wouldn't have been so
useful anyway.

------
modernerd
It _was_ a great product, but it became 'another inbox' to me. It was designed
to make communication frictionless, but it felt like a drag to check.

New communication services need to provide big, obvious benefits over existing
services, then communicate those benefits with early adopters in a way that
trickles downstream.

If we can learn one thing from Wave, it's how deeply embedded existing
communication methods are in our way of living and working; it's hard to pry
business users away from email and social users away from Facebook even if
you're Google.

In this sense, Wave wasn't a bad idea; it was a great idea ahead of its time.
I suspect that communication methods that are natural evolutions of existing
popular systems (e.g. fax machines, Skype) are likely to have higher adoption
rates than methods that take brilliant leaps too far too soon.

~~~
adrianwaj
Not much changed since Wave launched, they could've iterated more. Just
creating a platform and API isn't enough.

~~~
modernerd
I'm not sure that iterating more would have helped Wave. The basic concept of
a live chat/document editing platform was too far removed from what people are
familiar with, so finding a clear use for it was hard. I don't think Google
could have changed anything in the product to fix that, although they could
have iterated the _marketing process_ to pitch it to whatever audience were
using it most and spur uptake in that community, perhaps.

It would be interesting to see if a Wave-like collaboration platform would be
widely adopted if it grew organically over time out of an existing Google
product -- like Gmail.

~~~
adrianwaj
Wave from what I read was developed for use internally at Google when Gmail
was insufficient. I'd be curious to see what's being used within Google right
now in the collaboration space. People who were once using wave, what are they
now using?

~~~
pamelafox
Up until the day I left Google (last Friday), my team was still using Wave. We
were a bunch of ex-Wavers though, so we were more likely than others to still
be holding on.

I should point out that our internal version of Wave was different from the
external version in at least one very important way: when a wave was shared
with a group that you were a member of, the wave was sent to your inbox.
Externally, you would have to set up a search to find that wave, so basically
nobody ever read group waves. The idea behind the decision was to reduce inbox
noise (particularly important in beginning few months), but that also meant
reducing utility for group collaboration.

We were close to releasing proper groups support in the external version, so
you could easily choose which groups to follow/unfollow inside your Wave
inbox, but were discontinued before that made it out.

So, Wave was awesome for group collaboration, but unfortunately, we never gave
the external world much of a real opportunity to witness that.

(And yes, there were other issues with Wave. Just thought I'd point out that
one.)

~~~
jamesgeck0
That makes a lot of sense. My campus ACM group used Wave an enormous amount
when the beta invites started going out, and we kept two organizational waves
which mimicked the system you describe. One was a list of the screen names of
every member, and the other was a list of waves.

------
Maro
When Wave came out I thought it was really cool and used it for several weeks.
Then it wore off, we began using email for stuff we did on Wave, nobody was on
Wave anymore, so it slowly died.

One of the major factors for me was the crappy, slow UI.

Also, I think Wave lacked CONTEXT. It was great for collaborative editing, but
which kind? With friends about parties? With classmates about projects? With
colleagues about code? With customers about products? It imported a few Gmail
contacts from each group, not enough for either one to make sense in the long
run. It had some great features, but not enough for either one [compared to
email/Facebook/specialized webapp].

~~~
w1ntermute
> One of the major factors for me was the crappy, slow UI.

For me, that wasn't a problem in Chrome, interestingly enough. It was indeed
extremely slow in Firefox though. Maybe Google didn't have enough time to
optimize it for other browsers before the novelty started to wear off.

------
Pewpewarrows
Wave was an amazing product and set of technologies.

It was a release and marketing failure. Should have been in the Google
incubator at least another 6 months before Alpha/Beta, and shouldn't have made
the huge mistake of releasing a product to users with limited invites when the
entire purpose is collaboration. And that's what the focus of its marketing
should have been: collaboration. Group chat, forums, and wikis, here's your
replacement. Planning a trip or party? Use Wave instead of Gmail. That's all
it needed. Geeks want to hear about the cool technology in it, everyone else
just wants to know what the hell am I going to use this for.

------
thristian
I'm obviously not privy to Google's internal deliberations, but I've always
thought that Wave was a _great_ product - for people working in large
institutions like Google. If I had to regularly collaborate with people in
different offices, and with customers and suppliers, to keep track of a
variety of project state and planning documents, Wave would be an _excellent_
tool.

Unfortunately, my colleagues are in the same room, and I already have other
ways of communicating with my friends, so Wave isn't much good to _me_ , and
would probably never achieve mainstream success. It might have had a chance
with corporations fed up with Outlook, though.

------
nchlswu
Personally, I've never been surprised at Wave's apparent failure. To me, it
was no different than any other attempt at a "revolutionary idea" that didn't
work later in another revision or iteration (I think Hacker News readers
understand this very well;a poor analogy would be a Microsoft Tablet and an
iPad). A lot of discussion about it's failure is a direct result of Google's
status and the amount of resources required to come up with a product like
wave.

When I consider Wave in retrospect, I really think they limped in on this . It
was a grand experiment. If they really wanted this to succeed, I don't think
they would have proceeded with the launch the way they did. Reading the Quora
answer sort of jives with this.

I'm surprised no discussion touched upon the Anonymous response in the Quora
thread. It's more interesting than "why Wave failed" and is indicative of the
state of Google. It brings an additional perspective to the discussion around
Google's (apparent) talent retention problems. Combined with other anecdotal
evidence, it really look like Google is at a loss for how to continually
motivate employees with their current organizational structure

~~~
waterside81
Agreed. The most interesting bit of information from the thread is the
structure of the Wave team and how the incentives may have contributed to the
quality (or lack thereof) of the shipped product. Kind of like incentives on
Wall Street rewarding risky behaviour.

------
alecco
I don't know Quora. Is it all like this? (hearsay, public knowledge with some
narrative on top)

~~~
nailer
Yes.

------
mumrah
In case anyone didn't know, Wave is now in the Apache Incubator:
<http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html>

------
pasbesoin
Briefly (I need to run), when it was announced/described, I saw it solving a
lot of problems I've encountered:

Submarining discussions and decisions (e.g. email's that don't include the
whole group or that don't get shared with new members joining the group).

Excessive work to reconstruct discussions, events, decisions. (Again, "big
wads of emails" being a typical example.)

Centralized, rigid access controls. (You have to go through systems
administration to add somebody to a project. Sometimes, that in turn means
management sign off. Quickly, you're back to copy/pasting crap into, oh, for
example, email.)

Wasted time. For example, the last three points.

Lack of dynamic, group discussion separate from physical and chronological
synchronization and separate from the need for productivity killing meetings.
Some companies have (finally) caught onto internal bulletin boards and the
like, for this. But then somebody has to set them up, add users and
credentials, and centralize a whole lot of bureaucratic decisions that might
better be pushed out to the teams involved.

Lack of a centralized, uniform project communication history.

Etc.

Anyway, Wave seemed promising. But the client Google offered up was unusable
for most people. It was literally too slow, at first, on the client side. It
reflected the worst of Google's trend to abandon discoverability in its UI.
(I'm reminded of this in a smaller fashion every time I help a client's
employee take the dive into their calendar product. I'd argue that Android has
a fair amount of it, too.)

Also, early adopters would join and have no one to work with. Even when you
could get someone else invited, most didn't want to tackle it. Growth
stagnated.

I still think Wave' paradigm solves a lot of problems. Maybe Apache and third
parties will have better luck producing a usable client.

P.S. There were also many niggles and problems with the UI, such as default
decisions about account creation and account information sharing. The UI was,
basically, quite underdone. Finally, Google didn't continue to pour effort
into it nor give it enough time to take off.

------
ShabbyDoo
GMail's invite-based beta worked because there were no network effects in the
product's value proposition. Even if those with whom I frequently corresponded
did not use GMail, I benefited from the product. Wave was totally different --
everyone with whom I wanted to collaborate (at least in a particular context)
had to have accounts, and I didn't have that many to give out. The product
should have been implemented so that email/IM/whatever were used as fall-back
"protocols" for those who had not yet adopted Wave. Also, the invites should
have granted one the right to create N waves involving, say, 50 people max.

------
VladRussian
It can also be viewed in the context of recently posted (don't remember who's)
article which analyzed RIM's "interactive pager" vs. TIVO's PVR as example of
marketing positioning of "extension of existing product" vs. "a product
creating new product category".

In this case it may have been more successful if they developed and marketed
it as an "live collaboration" extension to GMail or as interactive
collaboration layer on top of Google Docs.

~~~
mindcrime
So true... Wave was actually pretty damn cool in a lot of ways, but they
seemed to do little or nothing to explicitly position / market it. Coupled
with the fact that the original UI was a bit, erm, awkward, and we get what we
have here today.

Thankfully Wave lives on at the ASF and hopefully people are going to be able
to use the technology to do some mondo radical stuff.

------
waterlesscloud
The answer seems to be that they didn't think it was a good product, it was
just a bone to keep someone around?

------
jmount
Google wave was classic groupware ( see
<http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html> ). And I think the people at Google
got confused in the sense they used it at a place they love (Google) so they
thought it was great (Wave).

------
InclinedPlane
Because Wave looked cool in demos.

Because it required interesting technology and was challenging and fun to
implement.

Because it solved problems (granted, all of the easiest and least important
problems).

A lot of products are brought to market through the same flawed process. Look
at the Segway for a perfect case in point.

~~~
nailer
> Because it solved problems (granted, all of the easiest and least important
> problems).

Unifying the benefits of email and IM in a single conversation isn't, for me,
easy or unimportant.

I thought Wave was engineering led rather than user led, but with some polish
and integration into existing apps (like GMail and Outlook) could have been a
killer.

------
charlesju
Haha. That's the problem with new ideas.

If they take off, you're heralded as a genius.

If the flop, they question why you even started in the first place.

Wave was spin to try and reinvent internet communication. It wanted to merge
email and IM and all these other communication forms together. Perhaps it was
way too ahead of its time. Perhaps the execution was not as well thought out
as it should have been. But the overarching concept is not ridiculous.

------
kateray
All I want Wave to be is Google Docs + Gchat on the same page. Possibly with
the ability to link parts of the doc with the Gchat conversation going on when
they were written.

------
adrianwaj
Wave actually shows the other person typing and editing. Really cool. Skype
doesn't do that, does/will Convore?

I use Wave and the main problem is the load time, and basically speed. They
need to get some HTML5 and local storage into it, maybe some Node.js.

Also, Waves can seem to go on and on, and one forgets why a wave was created
in the first place, and when one should be ended/closed.

So there should be a splitter button to start a new wave within an existing
wave.

It's rather like a text chat with someone. You never know what's going to come
up, so how can you categorize it before it's even begun? Or if you do, and it
goes off-topic, then what? Do you head-butt a wall or do you go to the beach?

------
js4all
I think the biggest problem, despite the invite system, was the missing
migration path from email.

Technically it was great and had soon my attention.

------
Kilimanjaro
Wave failed in the UI department. Common users don't like complexity.

------
drstrangevibes
IMHO .....because it was, the real problem was that people didnt see its
value, scalable online collaborative editing where some of the editors are
programmable bots, i dont think people really realised its potential
sadly.....

~~~
dekz
I'm not sure why people are anti wave. I still use it for the purpose of
multiple collaboration and it serves that purpose well. I honestly do not
think it is "ultimately useless".

~~~
arethuza
Just because you aren't a fan of a particular technology doesn't mean that you
are actively "anti". I actually went back and watched the original Wave demo
on Youtube just so I could reconstruct my original reactions, where were
basically:

\- That looks really cool

\- I wonder how they do _that_ (the synchronized live edits)

\- _I can't really think of any scenario where I would want to interact like
that_

Now I can see how some people might like it, but I really didn't - and I still
find it a struggle to see it being used.

Perhaps the gulf between email and instant messaging isn't just a
technological one, but actually corresponds the way most people are happy
interacting?

