
How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave - eadmund
https://jamey.thesharps.us/2018/02/16/how-not-to-replace-email/
======
rwallace
Wave was cool technology with interesting ideas, but there is no substitute
for getting the user interface right, and unfortunately they didn't. It's been
a long time and there might be others I'm forgetting, but there were two
important design errors:

1\. Email lets you type an entire message before sending; IRC at least lets
you type a whole paragraph, which is enough. Wave didn't let you type more
than one character before sending.

2\. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you
also want logical order, but unfortunately they provided the latter _instead
of_ the former, whereas you actually need _both_. (Gmail provides both: new
messages and threads. Git provides both: view changes, and view current code.
Google Docs provides both. Either view alone does not suffice.)

I would by all means encourage someone to take another shot at building
something like Wave, with those problems fixed.

~~~
amelius
Do you think HN solves point 2 correctly?

~~~
microtherion
I never cease to be amazed and dismayed at how much worse contemporary web
based discussion technologies (HN, Slashdot, Reddit, Disqus) are than Usenet
was back in the day.

~~~
klodolph
That’s fascinating… because I remember Usenet as being a complete cesspool,
useful if you wanted to get into arguments with the loudest people out there.

Not sure what “back in the day” is for you, but I remember e.g. comp.lang.lisp
being terrible in the 90s. And we all made jokes about flamewars, because
flamewars were reality.

~~~
microtherion
Yes, there were lots of arguments and loud people (referring to the 1990s),
but thanks to open protocols, there were newsreaders suitable for every kind
of usage profile, and many of them had very effective killfiles.

Even the dumbest of them would remember what articles you read and let you
pick up where you left when you came back the next day. That's a
straightforward feature that is sorely lacking on most web based discussion
sites (Twitter does it, but is lacking in threading).

------
sidcool
I saw the live presentation of Google wave at Google IO in 2009. I was in awe
of the technology & wanted my hands on it as soon as possible. The product
vision was amazing and long term. But the product was just way ahead of its
time. Apart from the performance issues and clunky UX, I feel the product
overall was very cool. I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave.

~~~
mercer
Google Wave had quite an effect on how I react to 'cool, new tech things'. I
was very excited about it and convinced friends to try it out, but then in
practice it just didn't 'click'.

Ever since I've been paying a lot more attention to the somewhat indefinable
'feel' of a tool. Trello, for example, felt right despite its relative
simplicity (or because of it?), so I felt like it had a bigger chance of
working out.

If I had to define it, I guess it would be something in the direction of what
someone in an early React presentation described as the 'pit of success'.
Using the tool feels like it was optimized for how 'you' use it, and I suppose
if everyone feels that way, it's got a chance of succeeding.

tl;dr: 'apart from the clunky UX' is probably a bad sign.

~~~
ghaff
On the other hand for me, Trello is something I use now and then because some
team I'm working with uses it for a workflow. But it's never really clicked
for me and isn't something I use unless I have to.

~~~
Drdrdrq
Sure, but do you use something else? It's simply incredible how low-quality
most "card apps" are (Jira leading the pack with awful UX/UI).

~~~
ghaff
No. Any "to do"/workflow apps I use, I go into with the best of intentions and
I get out of the habit after a while. For on deck articles and other content I
need to or am thinking about creating, upcoming conferences I may submit to or
attend, etc. I mostly just use a Google Sheet with tabs for the various
categories. And I mostly just use paper lists and a whiteboard for tracking
both someday/maybe projects as well as stuff to get done this week.

I mostly don't do software development except for the occasional learning
project.

------
mft_
I remember being very excited by Wave when it was released - and while I
didn't use it heavily, and didn't use it with many concurrent users on a
document, I never particularly suffered from the usability issues others have
described.

For me, though, it failed for two reasons:

* Wave was a solution in search of a problem, a need. It was fantastic as a tech demo --back when it was released, it was magical-- but it never seemed to fill a niche? It wasn't fully-fledged-enough to be a word processor, it wasn't really for communication, etc. I liked the description of other posters using it for gradually developing ideas --almost like a virtual pinboard-- but my guess is that very few teams work like this, and especially few outside of the bleeding edge tech space.

* Change is hard without a compelling reason. For example, I work in a (non-IT) organisation which offers people a choice of (legacy) MS Office + Sharepoint, vs. (the upstart) Google Docs. To me, Google Docs is far better for all a fraction of our work - it's faster, smoother, easier to share, and has (thanks to Wave!) collaborative editing... yet the proportion of users with the mindset to adopt it voluntarily I'd put at <5%, and probably even lower. And Wave offered a far less rounded, less compelling, less approachable product than Docs.

~~~
monk_e_boy
We use google docs in school, the students do multi-player documents all the
time. Being in the same room removes almost all of the friction. Want a team
member to research part of the topic and while you write the intro? Super
easy.

I'm not sure how to get that level of communication when the team is spread
across multiple locations... webcams maybe

~~~
username223
"multi-player documents"

I love this phrase! We did something similar way back in the day, only using
Emacs and "M-x make-frame-on-display" instead. Just like in your case, it
worked fine as long as everyone was in the same room. The one tricky part of
"multi-player Emacs" was that only one person at a time could use the
minibuffer.

------
pluma
I think the most important part is this:

> * Assuming you could stand Wave’s interface, it’d still be useless unless
> the people you wanted to communicate and collaborate with were also using
> it. Wave was intended to completely replace existing systems like email and
> chat, so it had no provisions for interoperating with those systems. To
> succeed, Wave required a revolution, a critical mass of people switching to
> the new way and dragging the rest of the world with them—and those haven’t
> worked out very often.

> * Making the revolution even more unlikely, initially Google offered Wave
> accounts by invitation only, so the people you wanted to talk with probably
> couldn’t even get an account.

I was excited about Google Wave at the time but first had to wait what felt
like ages for an invite and then barely anyone I knew was on it and I quickly
ran out of invites myself (because not everyone you send an invite will be as
excited to use it as you are).

To replace e-mail it would have had to at least provide some kind of gateway
between wave and e-mail to ease the transition -- or it would have had to
integrate more closely with other tools and applications to "trick" people
into adopting it (like how Google Talk integrated with GMail).

The "openness" was neat but didn't help them gain any traction because there
was no incentive to actually build and run your own server because there were
no users.

------
elvinyung
Not a shill: I think Notion [1] gets close to being a spiritual successor to
Wave (much more so than Slack). It's essentially a multimedia collaboration
tool and it's really nice. It's not quite a wiki, and distinctly more freeform
than a document editor, but still way more powerful than just a plaintext
editor or a chat app.

My social group has begun to use it it for a pretty wide variety of things,
ranging from rough notes to blog posts to draft documents.

[1] [https://www.notion.so](https://www.notion.so)

~~~
Alex3917
How is the data export? I like the idea, but the fact that it seems to only
export data into Markdown or HTML rather than something more structured, like
XML or JSON, makes me nervous.

~~~
kjksf
They are working on an API
([https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/963577523320717312](https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/963577523320717312))

------
sigsergv
The spirit of failure of Google Wave was very similar to Google Glass failure.
They were so badly presented, in so much wrong ways. The idea behind Wave is
extremely great but why, oh god, WHY it was presented as a consumer (and not
business/corp) product?!

~~~
Pxtl
This. Everytime I'm thrashig out a design with other developers on Skype I
wish we were using something mixing wiki and chat.

~~~
smt88
Google Docs has chat on the side and version history, along with live editing.
What is it missing that you'd want?

~~~
qznc
It does lack connections between documents like a wiki. While you can do
hyperlinks, it does not feel connected.

Also, can you structure documents into find hierarchy or tagging system?

Finally, no self hosting.

~~~
tajen
Better browsing across Google Docs documents would make it the killer
software.

\- It probably requires a left sidebar with a tree of the project’s documents,

\- And perhaps a notion of document hierarchy, child pages or something to
better browse. Aside from those, which aren’t technology challenging, it would
make my startup switch to GApps.

------
ryukafalz
>They released sample implementations under open source licenses, encouraged
others to run their own Wave servers independent of Google infrastructure, and
defined a federation protocol (on top of Jabber/XMPP) so that people on
different servers could still talk with each other.

With the caveat that this was of course several years ago, I seem to recall
the reference implementation missing several major features. Private replies
were notably absent.

It was all properly specced out, but the only available server software was
incomplete - at least, it was when I tried running it.

------
jasonlotito
I've said it in the past, and I'll say it again, Google Wave was a great idea
that was pitched by Google in a bad way. All it's promise was torpedoed
because of the way Google marketed it. There is nothing out there that solves
the problems Wave solved, and because of that, communication and collaboration
is still stuck in the Stone Age of the internet. Slack and Google Docs is the
best we have, and they don't do anything that couldn't be done decades ago.

~~~
marssaxman
Bad marketing seems plausible, because I never had any idea what problems it
was meant to solve; it always seemed like someone had dreamed up the fancy
architecture first and tried to justify it with use cases later.

------
puzzle
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the scrollbars yet. The original post
mentions the bespoke UI, but only faults it for using MDI.

The non-native scrollbars were smart and nifty, but, at the end of the day,
they were jarring to use. I don't remember many single UI features that ever
made me alternate so frequently between "neat!" and "WTH?!?". And I've seen
lots of interfaces on many platforms.

[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/)

~~~
ken
I thought I'd heard that the scrollbars were custom because it did some fancy
infinite-scrolling thing that wasn't really compatible with normal scrollbars.

If it's true they were custom to make them work well "on mobile devices or
netbooks with a limited mousing area", that's even worse. They know I'm on a
desktop computer with a big screen, and they're delivering a netbook-optimized
user experience.

------
gkya
The only thing that can replace e-mail is, e-mail. We need a means for
communications that are not instant, and allow for long-form, off-line,
complex interactions, based on decentralised infrastructure. That'll continue
to exist in some form along with all the other means we have, and that's a
nice thing.

------
m12k
On the flipside, there's also the point that while it's cool that Operational
Transform allows for a decentralized service without a central server, it also
makes the requirements to use and extend the algorithm (e.g. with new editing
commands for new types of media) needlessly complex if you're going to be
running it with a central server anyway. I can see why it might not be seen as
a solid business strategy at Google to launch a service with an increased
development and maintenance burden just so others can EEE it. This also
reminds me of the present day where blockchains are popping up in tons of
places where a central server would solve the task just fine.

Edit: Could any of the people downvoting me please state their position? I
didn't think my comment was disrespectful or off topic, so I'm wondering what
their problem with it is?

------
JepZ
Actually, I still like the idea of Wave, but to be honest, I didn't like the
idea of using a google server and as far as I remember, the self hosted
servers were available when Wave was abandoned by Google already and they were
in a miserable condition (buggy GUI, limited features).

So apart from these obvious problems I think their biggest mistake was the try
to replace email instead of evolving email to wave.

------
sam_goody
Careful what you wish for, you may get it...

Mail AMP is a Google controlled superset of email. It is a given by many that
chat is the ultimate social glue, and G already has their own chat protocol.
In the interest of keeping people engaged, and keeping them walled in, I kind
figured the long play of Google mail is to slowly morph all email into (a
partially email compatible) Wave.

------
erikrothoff
I think the killer idea with Google Wave was real-time collaboration on
anything. It was just way too broad. We used it for project planning like many
others here. Now I don't think there is anything a shared Google Doc or Google
Sheet doesn't solve more intuitively, with more specialised tools for the
task.

I love the idea described in the article of real-time collaborated _things_,
as opposed to a timeline of ideas from a team. Specially for things like
Github Issues or other bug management. The goal would be a shared living
document, not a list of discussions. Really cool!

------
Arathorn
> Would somebody please try again but with less hubris this time?

A lot of Matrix.org is inspired by what Wave could have been - although we are
running late with threading (but some work is happening currently there). From
our perspective, one of the biggest gaps was the lack of bridging in Wave to
other existing comms interfaces (eg email) - as well as the quirky UX.

------
digi_owl
Not sure if anything really can replace email.

After all it is a store-and-forward transmission system with arbitrary length
text and inline attachment of binary data.

all this makes individual emails self contained.

Various proposed replacements are more focused on the "conversation" it seems.

~~~
sova
and yet here we are, not discussing this by e-mail.

------
voiper1
>Assuming you could stand Wave’s interface, it’d still be useless unless the
people you wanted to communicate and collaborate with were also using it. Wave
was intended to completely replace existing systems like email and chat, so it
had no provisions for interoperating with those systems. To succeed, Wave
required a revolution, a critical mass of people switching to the new way and
dragging the rest of the world with them—and those haven’t worked out very
often.

Back in the day, when I realized there was no backward-interop with email, I
was afraid it wasn't going to go very far... network effect is hard to tame.

~~~
bsimpson
I still can't believe they tried to build hype around a tool that was useless
without a network effect, and then rationed off invitations to actually use
it. The PM couldn't have possibly been surprised when it didn't catch on.

~~~
mnx
I think they saw it as an effective method for building hype. I mean, gmail
used to work on invites too.

~~~
bsimpson
Yeah, but Gmail could trade messages with all the email accounts everyone
already had; there was no bootstrapping a social platform problem.

------
mark_l_watson
Brilliant article. Loved the idea that new technologies must provide bridges
for older technology that people may need to use.

I am one of the four people who really liked Google Wave. I wrote a plug-in
for it, and when Wave was shut down I stood up an instance of Apache Wave for
friends and family. Basically no one wanted to use it except to play with it
for a few minutes.

I want to check out the author’s C to Rust translator that he mentioned at the
end of the article.

------
bane
When Wave came out I worked at a small software company that was pretty
distributed all over the country. Wave came as close as anything ever has for
being the perfect collaboration tool for us. The key was taking the set of
tools that Wave provided and putting them together to support your desired
outcome.

Here's something I wrote about it back then.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533023)

Sadly, since Google killed it, I've never been able to get other teams to pick
up the open sourced versions and now everybody just wants to use <insert
latest startup collab tool>.

It definitely had a tremendous number of problems in execution, but I never
really _got_ why Google killed it so fast. It seems that a reboot and rethink
of some core metaphors would have tightened it up into the new paradigm it
needed to become.

------
peoplewindow
_The initial implementation was a JavaScript-heavy web application in an era
when people weren’t used to that. Browsers weren’t optimized to run so much
code and so the user experience was terrible_

There seems to be some historical revisionism here. Perhaps you could have
said that about Gmail but no, when Wave came out people were very much used to
crappy web apps. Wave suffered because it tried to make browsers do too much
but that's been a common pathology for the entire history of the web, it was
nothing to do with users not being "used to it".

If they'd written Wave as a desktop app it would have had more of a chance. I
remember using it and the performance was awful, but not for any fundamental
reason. Browsers just suck as app platforms.

------
threefour
I wrote a complete case study on Google Wave here:
[https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Fail-Learning-
Experience/dp/19...](https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Fail-Learning-
Experience/dp/1933820179)

------
factorialboy
Google Ware failed as a product but its underlying technology was successfully
absorbed into Google Docs, Slides, Spreadsheets etc.

------
vbezhenar
I never really understood all the buzz about it. I used it few times with
friends to plan holidays, it was surely useful, but it looked like a very tiny
product, not something important and huge. Something that bored developer
could build on holidays. I guess, I didn't discover something important.

------
realworldview
Glittering, but definitely not gold. We used it for 15 minutes, ended up
discussed how bad it was then rolled our eye in fake surprise when it was
quickly dropped. Subsewuent discussions were about how it embodied the nee
software generations. “Let’s do it because we can do it!”

Google Wave? No, Google Edsel, Mk1.

------
some1else
We once collaborated on a design document in Wave, before discovering that
printing wasn't really supported by the app. I was very impressed and excited
by Wave, but we all just needed better Google Docs.

------
wnevets
IMHO wave's biggest problem was the close beta hype.

------
drumhead
90 minute help video, that was enough to put me off.

------
tammer
I think these lessons are so profound that they actually extend beyond
technology to most business or social concepts.

------
qaq
Well I think they missed the mark Wave could have being MS Teams, hipchat,
slack alternative with a bit of tweaking :)

------
rorygibson
Replacing other forms of communication is always a non-starter; every org
builds up data legacy in the various tools they've tried out over the years.

(Shameless plug: that's why I built CTX -
[https://getctx.io](https://getctx.io) \- a SaaS cloud search tool that
indexes your data in things like email, Slack, Trello, GitHub, JIRA and Google
Drive)

------
MichelChouinard
Thanks for this article.

Make me wonder... What happen to projects that apache incubator retire like
this one?

------
tomrod
I liked Google Wave.

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nishlashakya
cool

------
mozumder
Pretty sure I was one of the few people that used Wave on an actual
collaborative project of dozens of people. It was great, way ahead of its
time. I thought it was more useful than Slack is right now. The only real
complaint I had with it was it's slightly slow user interface. With today's
tech it would own.

------
cma
I wonder if heavy use of XML stunted it.

------
nkkollaw
I wonder why people but so much effort trying to replace things that work
perfectly and no one wants replaced. Email, door locks, etc. work well as it,
it's a non-problem.

How about banks? I live in Poland and used to exchange Euros into Zloty at
3.97 with a 5% commission through my bank. Now I use Transferwise, and they
give me a rate of 4.17 with a neglegible fee (a few cents). Now, that's an
innovation that I welcome!

~~~
Gustomaximus
Old candy bar phones worked perfectly. Why every invent full screen glass
phones.

I don't have a problem trying to reinvent email. I do have an issue if they
use market power to damage an existing technology that works well and openly
across platforms.

~~~
nkkollaw
They didn't. You couldn't change the UI.

~~~
cdancette
This makes no sense for me.

Email has plenty of issues too, you can't just take any new features the
smartphones have and call it a default of the old phones.

Email is "perfect" as long as nothing better replaces it, then it will no
longer be perfect?

A few issues of email I can think of : no guarantee your email will arrive,
and no real acknowledgement it did. Also, Mailing lists are clunky for users
(I still receive regularly emails with 500 recipients, where a mailing list
would be far more appropriate). I also think of attachments, which are very
limited in size with a lot of providers.

So email is far from perfect, it's just that nothing better has arrived yet.

