
Google Wave’s failure is a lesson for modern real-time collaboration tools - feross
https://blog.taskade.com/google-wave-history/
======
spankalee
Wave's problem was even more fundamental than I think the article is getting
at. Wave was, as an end-user facing product, far too amorphous. It could be
used for email, for documents, for chat, and for just about anything else via
bots.

The UI and features allowed for all of these things, but guided you on none of
them. There were no first-class workflows for any of the possible use cases.

No, I don't want a conversation to spring up anywhere in the middle of a
document. I want the workflows and UI for edits, suggestions, and comments to
be distinct and guide me and all of my collaborators towards clear and
efficient ways of accomplishing my goals. With Wave we had to invent our own
conventions for each task. That's why everyone shrugged and left.

Wave as an enabling technology and platform for apps would have been great
though. Make it easy to repackage the basic features in a tailored UI for
chat, email, docs, etc... Maybe even leave in the general interface to allow
for hybrid apps, universal inbox, etc. At least the specific apps would have
avoided confusion on what Wave is actually for.

~~~
pen2l
I think I sort of agree with you.

But I think that imposition of workflow is not taken kindly by users, users
only like things in line of the status quo.

I think the greatest sin by Google was shutting down Inbox. I swore by it (the
little travel cards, the ability to see and search email quickly -- e.g. the
image previews, every day Gmail angers me because I cannot do things I could
once do with incredible ease).

They should have had Gmail as a conservative conventional email tool, and
slowly morphed Inbox to have Wave-like features. Slowly, iteratively, so that
users could discover and organically make their own workflows.

~~~
nerpderp82
Absolutely, our problems are not technical they are social and you overwhelm
them with a lack of direction and too much choice, most folks, myself included
will get paralyzed with what they should do next.

Checklists and linear flows are extremely important. Just look at how
different bug systems or wikis are used by groups, same tools, different
groups and their usage patterns are totally different.

Wave should have been a platform, and the workflows should have been curated
as an organization specific behavior.

~~~
sneak
Somehow that didn’t seem to be a problem in Minecraft or git.

I think that there is a value in making software that is powerful and does not
immediately make apparent precisely how best to use it. Examples also include
NLE video and audio suites, and much CAD/3D tools.

Your tools do a thing. The operator makes the workflow. Make good tools, not a
yellow brick road sold as one-size-fits-all.

The first few times I opened Live or Illustrator or After Effects or Sketchup
I had no idea how to use them; I had to watch tutorials on YouTube to learn
the mental models.

What webapps are like that? I offer that they have a corresponding loss of
power.

~~~
jcelerier
Git is a problem for a lot of people. And A/V tools only become useable if you
follow tutorials or courses - there are entire companies making their business
on selling pro tools or after effects tutorial videos.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Maybe we should allow a market for education rather than assuming everyone
should be able to use a starship with only 5 seconds of looking at the user
interface.

~~~
jcelerier
I don't think this works in a market economy - some people _are_ able to "use
a starship with only 5 seconds of looking at the user interface". So they will
always be incredibly more advantaged that people who aren't able to.

------
lkrubner
Google quit. Google always quits. Google is terrible at products. It's simple.

I enjoy reading a detailed analysis of a product's failure, but at the same
time, lets remember that Google's leadership tends to fail the same way, over
and over again.

I assume that Google is trying to follow a "fail fast" philosophy, so if a
product does not do well in a set time frame, it is shut down. That is a great
strategy for conserving capital. But it does mean that Google won't get into
some markets, because other players are simply more patient, and are willing
to stay in longer and get through the rough phase.

~~~
mav3rick
Yes, Gmail FAILED Android FAILED Chrome FAILED. Let's not forget the elephant
in the room SEARCH also FAILED.

Also saving capital but a 10yr bet on self driving cars.

~~~
maxlamb
To be fair, Gmail and Chrome are 16 years old, and Google acquired Android 15
years ago. Their main search algorithm of course was developed over 21 years
ago. That doesn't leave a good track record for the last 15 years or so...

~~~
smeyer
There's nothing on par with the main search product, but here are some of
their products that seem successful from the 2010s: Google Drive, Google
Flights, Google Hangouts, Tensorflow, and Google Photos. This isn't an attempt
to be an exhaustive list, but these are all products that a lot of people on
this board probably use frequently and have stuck for years.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Hangouts is an example of a failure: Google had a huge hit with Talk/Hangouts
and for a while it was THE leading chat app. ...And then they mostly abandoned
it, told everyone to use one of a half dozen different replacements which all
failed as people moved onto other things. Had they continued to modernize and
prioritize Hangouts, all of the newer chat startups would never have even
existed. It "won" the early chat app fight and basically heralded the death of
AIM, YIM, and MSN messenger, only to be murdered in-house by Google's own
product teams.

Google Photos I think is reasonably successful, but mostly as "where your
Android's photos end up". I am not sure how many people have a strong
relationship with Google Photos. And I still hear about people upset about
Google killing Picasa in favor of it. It is worth nothing that Picasa, the
foundation of Photos, was not something Google developed, but something Google
acquired from outside.

~~~
dreamcompiler
Picasa was damn good software. I still miss it.

~~~
thombat
It gets ever-more rickety but it's still usable, and I still use it: the
combination of decent face recognition, useful tools, fast UI, locally-stored
photos is a combination that I value and I've yet to find an acceptable
substitute on Windows or Linux.

~~~
mceachen
If it gets too rickety for you, you should try PhotoStructure. It's locally
hosted, can be run on docker/headless or on a desktop, the libraries are
read/writeable across platforms, and it has the most robust asset merging and
tag inference that I'm aware of.

My beta users are using it for free in exchange for their feedback. I'm hoping
to release the final beta within a week. After beta there will be free and
paid tiers.

Read more: [https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-
photostructure/](https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/)

Changelog: [https://photostructure.com/about/release-
notes/](https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/)

------
jefftk
I think there's a good chance Wave could have been Slack, if the team had
focused on businesses instead of consumers. But at the time Google wasn't
culturally set up for that kind of business, and gave up on Wave instead.

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

~~~
threw4234324
I know right ? Slack is horrible for archiving (and the bloat, OMG the bloat);
Wave being more integrated could've had an advantage here.

~~~
p_l
My number one memory of Wave is the incredible, outstanding, astonishing
amounts of bloat.

When you hit "oh god, this is actually bloated as hell" in Slack, it's way
after you're hooked and can't switch.

------
blakesterz
This was interesting:

"When the Maps project was completed, Lars and Jens moved on to develop a
product dubbed “Walkabout.” Their ultimate goal was to answer a number of
questions about how people communicated online:

Why are there divisions between email, chat, and document-based
communication?"

That very first question they asked, they didn't get a good answer? Maybe
that's why it failed?

I feel like there are very good reasons there are divisions between all those
things. Those are all different things, and I use them all in very different
situations, and those divisions are a good thing, and there's no reason I'd
want one thing to do that.

I remember when they launched this, the technology seemed amazing, but I
couldn't think of any reason I'd use it.

~~~
pfortuny
I think the PERCEPTION (not necessarily the fact) of the difference between
sinchronicity and asynchronicity is key here. Chat: synchronous. Mail:
asynchronous.

And then: real-time collaboration and edition is kind of orthogonal and very
different (and difficult) to understand (very few times do you do something
really collaborative, even on a blackboard).

~~~
downerending
Seconded. And there's a special ring of hell for people that want me to attend
synchronously while they slooowly compose what amounts to a lengthy email...

------
mensetmanusman
My favorite post-mortem failure mode of Wave was that people were not actually
leaving chat trails behind for future searching.

As people were typing, the other people could see the response in real time
and would begin typing a response, the first person would see a response was
being typed, delete their message and start typing a response ad nauseam.

~~~
franky47
This, plus the infinite reply indentation lead to some very interesting
conversations with my friends, which turned out to be an unreadable mess only
days later.

It was great for real-time brainstorming though.

------
JackPoach
It's important to note that Google Wave has failed as a PRODUCT, not as a
CONCEPT. There are a number of incredibly successful post-wave platforms, like
Bitrix24, which is way more popular than Slack/MSTeams in Eastern Europe or
Vietnam or South Africa, for instance (make sure you try
[https://bitrix24.com](https://bitrix24.com) if you've never heard about it).

Here's my analogy. Google Hangout has failed (as did G+), but Zoom is booming
as are Facebook or VK. While I agree with much of the analysis, it's important
to understand the difference between concepts and products. This is very
helpful when trying to understand why Skype had been struggling.

------
askvictor
The biggest problem we had trying to use it (in two different organisations)
was that we couldn't get the entire team on it as it was invitation only, with
limited invites. That completely killed any reason to use it.

------
runnerup
I enjoyed google wave very, very much. I knew it was way ahead of its time,
but I hope it inspired some features in today's products (OneNote? obviously
Google Docs)

~~~
spankalee
Google Docs already existed. They overhauled the real-time collaboration
system to be based on Wave's, but that's about it.

------
wbillingsley
It was cancelled so fast after its hype, I recall thinking there must have
been some kind of bust-up among different layers of management. Google cancel
things, but usually not that quickly.

Particularly, I wondered if Google in the US thought too many engineers at
Google in Australia were leaping onto the hype and they wanted them back on
core business.

That is, however, purely uninformed speculation and guesswork.

------
danpalmer
All online communication methods are trending towards being Google Wave. I've
believed this for a while and haven't heard a good counter argument (open to
them!).

If you believe this then I think there are a couple of conclusions one could
reach:

1\. Google are smart. They saw what the logical conclusion of trends was and
designed a product that satisfied those, yet users didn't want it.

2\. Moves by communication tools in that direction, adding scope or "bloat" to
their featureset is therefore doomed to failure, which fits with the cycle we
see of productivity tool disruption -> bloat -> reduced productivity -> newer
simpler disruptors.

~~~
lucideer
I think it's a bit more nuanced, and is not quite either.

Google Wave had two relevant components: (a) its network infrastructure and
(b) its user interface.

\- by (a) I mean the extension of xmpp

\- by (b) I mean not only the visual design and ux, but also the accompanying
development ecosystem around integrations/media renderers/etc.

The innovations of Wave were, I believe, primarily in (a). Anything cool in
(b) was merely a feature built directly because of/on top of something novel
in (a)

I'm not sure why exactly Wave failed, but I suspect it was primarily because
of the execution of (b).

And I think your point about online communication methods trending toward Wave
are largely concerned with Google's innovations with xmpp

~~~
acdha
B) is Google’s Achilles heel. Their corporate culture just doesn’t take UX
seriously even as it kills products — I’ve been seeing GCP fall into disfavor
because the UI is second-tier, and that’s something where a tiny team could
make big improvements very quickly because there’s so much low-ganging fruit.

------
kebman
Google uses many if not all of the features from Wave in Google Drive. Thus I
do not consider it a pure failure, although it doesn't look like it panned out
for them the way they thought it would.

~~~
jimsmart
Some of the features from Wave also made it into Google Docs, albeit somewhat
evolved. (Specifically here, I'm talking about the algorithm for handling
collaborative edits)

------
samdung
FWIW, i was part of the team that was working on a similar tool back in
2009-10. Google Wave blindsided us and we thought we would be killed before
launch. We launched anyway and failed to get much traction: You can see our
intro video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjezWHeNOas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjezWHeNOas)

------
teejmya
Site is down, here's an archive
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200408184839/https://blog.task...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200408184839/https://blog.taskade.com/google-
wave-history/)

------
markandrewj
Another issue at the time was scaling wave. I remember there being issues as
threads grew in size.

------
citrusx
I think it was pretty clear that Wave wasn't going to take off as a
replacement for email (or, much else) once the fifth or sixth person asked how
you could "make a wave send you a note in gmail when it updated".

------
kpajko
I remember tinkering with it at that time. It was an exceptionally good tool,
a Swiss army knife, but at the company we could not find a real use case for
it. Alas it was a small team. Most businesses had their more or less working
solutions, and habits hardly change. I think it was shut down too early, not
giving enough time to get in. Providing a more business-oriented solution
instead of the near-bare "API" and being a tool, it could have been the best
collaboration tool of the current situation...

------
erwinh
Still so, the Wave announcement was for me at least quite a memorable moment
in the history of the web, showcasing what's possible when embracing the new
possibilities of the internet and pushing the boundaries of what people think
about.

A lot of inventions, innovators or hackers don't achieve big scale but still
have impact with the ideas they have put forward, no need to label it a
failure right away :)

------
stevage
I think the suggestion that the failure was a question of timing,
"positioning" and a poor launch is naive. It wasn't a very good product. It
had some nifty features but they were all jumbled together into a mess that
didn't solve real problems. Was Google even using it internally?

------
stareatgoats
Things like this is in my experience not so much a technical problem as a
people problem. No inside info, but if the PM manager doesn't look eye to eye
with top management (and if they are unable to solve it for any reason) then
the project is going to shut down.

And it will be blamed on the tech, or whatever.

------
koolhead17
Google Wave was ahead of its time. It has more to do with timing than
technology or product.

------
chiefalchemist
Wave limited new users to the point of shooting itself in the foot. If you had
a small group/team of six, and only five had Wave access you couldn't use Wave
because of the sixth.

You don't grow a team-centric tool by not allowing teams to use it.

------
tilolebo
I was so excited when it was announced.

I got my invite early November 2009, then... Well then I was the only one of
my friends using it, so my interest quickly decreased. It's sad it never took
off, the idea was really cool.

~~~
tilolebo
The preview email: [https://postimg.cc/dkGMG0sZ](https://postimg.cc/dkGMG0sZ)

------
everydaypanos
I wonder how much of Wave's death was from resistance from inside Google(GMail
team, or even other execs). Fear for the destruction of GMail even from
another Google product.

------
factorialboy
Google Wave failed as a product, but as a technology it was successfully
absorbed into the Google Docs suite with Docs, Sheets and Slides having real
time editing capabilities.

------
milkymilk
Quip is the modern day Google wave. They copied Google wave to a T and for
some strange reason the market has accepted their product as useful.

------
hmcamp
In light of recent events, would Google Wave still have failed if they
launched in 2020? It’s a curious question for me.

~~~
dx034
Teams and Slack have covered the collaboration market quite well (and there
are others as well). What really took off are video conferencing solutions
(e.g. Zoom).

Google had products here but were never able to offer a single, easy solution.
If they had combined Duo and Hangouts from the start, maybe they'd have the
success that Zoom now has.

------
schwede
Its success aside, I thought Wave was really cool. It worked pretty well for
school group projects.

------
mark_l_watson
I was a fan of Wave, and then Apache Wave. I liked Apache Wave’s simpler UI,
but I found the code base difficult to understand. At least for my skills, it
was not hackable. It has been several years since I have spun up Apache Wave,
not since Apache Foundation put the project on ice.

------
sbussard
I loved Google Wave. I even wrote a Gadget for it

------
milkymilk
Quip is the modern version of Google wave.

------
dilly_li
If Google Wave launches in today's climate, will it survive?

~~~
qubex
I assume that was meant to be a conditional, and if so, the answer would be an
unprovable counterfactual.

