
Apache open sourcers welcome Google's unwanted Wave - _grrr
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/24/apache_google_wave/
======
frb
_Wave didn't wash outside a few early adopters like Novel, SAP, and, er, the
US Navy, and it looks like Google's still having trouble conveying exactly
what Wave is and what it does._

Just wondering what the plans of these early adopters are. You can't make
money off something if nobody uses it. Isn't this why Google scrubbed the
project in the first place?

Don't get me wrong. I think that Wave is/was an interesting project and I
tried really hard to use it, I really did. But somehow email/IM/whatever was
always faster and more practical, in the sense that people responded to my
requests. When using Wave I always had to remember people: "It's in Wave",
"Haven't you checked Wave?"...

I, and the other people I worked with, just couldn't get Wave into our
workflow and someday we just forgot about it completely.

It would be really interesting how the Navy uses Wave and for what. A kind of
best-practice report on how to use Wave productively would be very interesting
and motivating (at least for me). Tell me how to use it and I'm ready to give
it another shot.

~~~
lmkg
> A kind of best-practice report on how to use Wave productively

I think that, right there, is why Wave failed. It needs "best practices" to
work well.

The tool on its own did not improve productivity. It needed discipline and
training to learn how to use the tool, and there was a large gap between what
was possible and what was useful or productive. By many people's accounts,
once you cross that gap it becomes useful, but for anybody who doesn't self-
identify as an early adopter, it's a non-starter.

Compare Wave to email, or to IM. There are people who are good at email and
people who are bad at email. There are people who just don't get the medium,
and are bad at communicating with it, and who could benefit from learning some
email etiquette or best practices. But you know what? Even without being good
at email, _they can still use email effectively_. Even when the medium is not
being used to its full potential, it's still more efficient than other media.
The same goes for IM.

With Wave, this is not the case. If you throw a bunch of people at Wave, the
first thing that comes out is an unstructured, ad-hoc clusterfuck. It doesn't
become useful until you standardize a process on what gets its own wave, what
info goes where, and so forth. Learning to be productive in the tool is an
additional step beyond learning how to use the tool. And whatever you decide,
isn't enforced by the tool itself, so if someone doesn't "get it," that can
put information in the wrong place or disorganize stuff, and make everything
confusing again.

Compare this to email, where there is an existing workflow defined by the
Compose, Reply and Send functions. Put the text in the box, other person reads
the text, and each email is a line item in Outlook. In short, all the
organization that you have to invent in Wave is already present in email, and
it's enforced by the tool rather than a gentleman's agreement not to make
everything into a clusterfuck.

Wave lets you make your own rules, but it also makes you make your own rules,
while email comes with its own set of rules built-in. For some people, being
able to make your own rules is useful because email's are sub-optimal, but for
the majority of people, email is Good Enough, and the benefit of making your
own rules is worth neither the cost of having to invent your own process, or
the friction of having to maintain it by fiat.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Further reinforcing the idea that google is good at engineering and bad at UI.

Good systems with good UI should guide you to the best way of doing things
naturally. Much of good design is picking good defaults, for example. That's
the point of user interactive software. Your software serves as a translation
between the abstractions and mental models of the user and the mechanisms
necessary to do work in the computer.

------
ThomPete
Wave was a paradigm shift with too many paradigms.

Had they integrated only the functionality you could find in etherpad into
Gmail the story would have been very different IMHO.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Into GMail? Why?

Do you mean Docs? It's there.

~~~
ThomPete
Because gmail is a communication platform and that is basically what they
wanted to make Wave into.

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l0nwlf
Can't wait more to see the algorithm behind Google Wave. It may have failed(?)
as a commercial product, but as a technical product it was kick-ass.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
What algorithm in particular? I don't want to imply that getting everything to
actually work is a small feat, but I wasn't aware of anything especially
clever going on...

~~~
jankassens
The core algorithm is called "Operational Transformation". See
[http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-
applyi...](http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applying-
operational-transformation)

~~~
mnemonik
I found this paper to be really helpful as well, which is linked to from that
article: ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/JupiterWin.ps

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adrianwaj
I have been really happy with wave and would like to thank Google for
releasing it. I am sure they use it internally, and will keep using it at
Google in 2011. Although, they might have something better going on.

Kind of reminds me of Google Answers that they closed down (I think
prematurely,) which was in a segment that is and has become highly demanded.

------
Marticus
I can't help it, but it's my Wave in a box.

