
Google Kills Wave - elfred
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html
======
tc
_Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked._

Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a _consumer_ product, à
la Facebook?

Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for _corporate_ communications. With
the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace
Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to
transcend email.

Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really
does.

\----

PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited
as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could
run on your own network.

PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a
number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations
of the needed components.

PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally
integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private
(but federated) uptake as an email replacement.

~~~
thorax
We use it exclusively for our meeting status reports, etc.

It's just a wicked solid tool for meetings and out-of-band document
collaboration. I'd love to see it continue. I'm sad it didn't get the adoption
they wanted, but I also wonder what they expected when they didn't even really
try to integrate it with GMail.

If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave,
I think they'd have better success for it.

~~~
orangecat
_If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave,
I think they'd have better success for it._

No question. Wave should have been an alternate view of your Gmail account.
Instead it was a completely distinct environment that you had to manage
separately, which most people aren't going to be bothered to do.

~~~
thegyppo
The main reason I didn't like it is a very simple one, and it has to do with
automatic sign-in to Google properties based on whether you're logged into
Analytics or Gmail or the like.

Since we use a corporate email for Analytics but personal ones for Wave it
meant having to switch logins all the time. Might sound trivial but actually
put me off using the product at all.

~~~
bl4k
If you had an apps account, you could have requested Google Wave. We got it a
while ago.

------
alextgordon
It failed because it was completely invisible.

Facebook spams your inbox. They _make sure_ you know that you have an account
and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat,
etc).

With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in
January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on
July 21st. I'm only just finding out _now_. What kind of a communication tool
is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring.

The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had
actually _notified_ users when they got new messages, they would have logged
into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.

Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it
had.

~~~
runT1ME
You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace
email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day,
or have it constantly open, etc.

Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have
Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..

~~~
judofyr
The point is that Wave is never going to replace email over the night, so in
the beginning it's very useful to get an email whenever something interesting
happens. As you receive more and more emails, you realize that it's a lot
easier to just keep Wave constantly open and you'll turn off email
notification.

But before that point Wave does not deserve its own tab, and because of the
lack of email notifications it's very easy to simply forget about checking
Wave.

------
dpcan
Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to
start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when
I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite
IF they ever did.

So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to
everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers.

I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.

~~~
Zak
I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and
thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a
Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in
theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the
only provider.

~~~
amackera
I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure
to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just
waited until they could deliver.

It's pure conjecture of course!

~~~
nl
It wasn't so much that they lacked infrastructure as that the early versions
didn't scale so well.

I got a very early invitation, and it was pretty slow, and got worse as they
added more users. They fixed that of course, but it did slow down the roll-
out.

~~~
mechanical_fish
So why not have another rollout? Sponsor some contests? Hold more demos in
tech conferences? Build a Wave-to-Twitter gateway? Build a demo site which
gives every HN article it's own wavelet, or whatever?

------
BobbyH
I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to
Google to work on Google Wave: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015>

~~~
DTrejo
I still miss etherpad. I use some of the alternatives, but it's not the same
:(

alternatives: <http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html>

~~~
peregrine
Google docs is very similar to what etherpad used to be. All be it far less
user friendly you can watch others edit and update in real time.

~~~
param
<http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html>

~~~
peregrine
Thanks for pointing that out.

------
icarus_drowning
This really makes me sad. I work in media, and I have found that the
collaborative aspects of Wave really made that process easier. I scored an
entire film earlier this year, and the producers and I only used Wave as our
collaboration space. It was _beautiful_. Keeping track of various versions of
each cue was easily 10x easier than my usual mode (email/FTP/Skype/Phone/etc).

We started off with a collaborative list of every cue needed during the first
run through, and then let that list grow bigger and bigger with inline replys.
Wave's built-in media features meant that I could paste mp3's into the space
and let the filmmakers hear my work immediately, and then download the file to
put into the project. This meant that when it came time to FTP the big,
uncompressed files, it was _only_ the finals, which made things a _lot_
easier.

Likewise, collaborating with temp music was a breeze-- the filmmakers even
scored a few sections of the film with temp music and then put the video right
into the conversation. (No more folders full of giant quicktime files with
different scores).

I know that I'm going to miss that experience. Oh well. Perhaps someone will
take the open-source'd code from Google and build a better product.

I'm not holding my breath.

------
Goosey
I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially
responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after
getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this
mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could
just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over.

I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company
chain email threads from hell forever now.

~~~
StavrosK
I blame it on never understanding the UI, the way it did things, or its
usefulness. It's like a chat you can't delete things from, and everyone sees
what you type and all your mistakes? And you can post pictures?

I just don't get it.

~~~
roc
The incredibly powerful, federated, open protocol/platform was what excited us
geeks.

The client always sucked and was, at the most generous, a tech demo of things
the protocol/platform was capable of.

~~~
commandar
And the problem is that the client is what Google marketed.

The client should have been nothing but a tech demo. The potential power of
Wave was in that it could move totally arbitrary data between independently
federated servers, and had support for robots that could manipulate that data
in arbitrary ways.

It could have been a Facebook/Twitter/Flicker/Whatever killer, but Google got
tied down with working on the bloated UI rather than building out the platform
and letting others handle the frontend of it.

------
jacquesm
That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it
out.

Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be
met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll
wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where
it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted?

edit: would be nice if they open sourced the code.

~~~
evansolomon
They launched Wave in May of 2009. It's not like they yanked it all that
quickly.

~~~
kenjackson
Microsoft announced, then released, spent $250M on advertising, and then
killed a new phone in that time.

~~~
brown9-2
To be fair, Google did the same thing in the same time frame with the Nexus
One, minus the ad budget.

Sometimes disrupting existing markets and paradigms takes time, patience, and
several iterations.

(I'm still disappointed at how quickly they stopped the direct-sale idea with
the Nexus One)

~~~
tomhogans
The biggest problem with selling the Nexus One direct was support. Carriers
didn't want to support a phone that hadn't branded and Google couldn't accept
that people don't want to ask a community message board and wait a few days
for a reply when their phone doesn't work.

~~~
bokchoi
The community message board support model doesn't work for google. My current
peeve is this god-awful bug thread for adding an additional account to an
Android phone:

    
    
      http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=6981e6d970e2f29f&hl=en

------
bentoner
It seems that at their scale, Google doesn't bother to (is unable to?) evolve
individual products, rather they pivot by launching and killing entire
projects.

The same thing happened with Google's 3D world product, Lively, and the
following comparison of Lively with IMVU by Eric Ries is pertinent:

 _"By the time they [Google] actually managed to launch something, they were
building the product that we had already discovered was not the right product
100 iterations ago.

"But they launched it with such high fanfare and expectations; they were so
convinced they got it right, that it was actually the mismatch between the
expectations that Google--one of the most public companies in the world--put
behind this product, and then its pathetic results...

"The product wasn't a bad product and it's not like nobody wanted to use it
(of course they wanted to use it for stuff that embarrassed Google) but it was
the mismatch that really caused them to have to pull it; it was very
embarrassing for them...

"Even after they launched they really didn't give it enough time to learn and
iterate because they had set the wrong expectations, a classic big-company
[inaudible]."_

[<http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup> \-- starting at 6:35 in the
audio]

~~~
elblanco
This is really a key point. Outside of a few wave template buttons, has any of
the core interface problems with the Wave client been addressed since the
initial semi-private-invite-only release? Wave seems fundamentally the same to
me as a user as it did a year ago when I first saw it. Yet users in general
have complained about the same problems the entire time, none of which appear
to have been addressed.

------
jsdalton
From last year...

"Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354>

------
mixmax
The problem with useradoption of wave largely came from their invite-only
strategy. It's a social tool that requires my friends to have an account for
it to be of any use. If they don't have invites and can't join it's useless.

It's amazing that Google didn't see this.

~~~
jgoewert
That is dead-on the reason I stopped using it.

Woot! I got an invite.

Dang, none of my friends did.

Well... when can I get them one.

Forget about this. Meh. Back to email, IM, IRC and Twitter.

~~~
ern
I managed to invite my friends, only to find one non-geek who didn't know how
to install Chrome Frame, and couldn't run anything but IE on her work machine
(corporate policy).

The overhead of using IM group chats when she was in the conversation, and
Wave when it was the rest of us, was too much, so we just dumped Wave.

------
zavulon
Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively)
early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products
and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that.

I really hope Buzz is next.

~~~
mkramlich
The complement of Release Early/Often is probably Kill Early/Often.

EDIT: spelling fixed, thanks!

~~~
frossie
You know what the complement of Kill Early/Often is? It's me never letting my
shop use a new Google product ever again.

People _invest time_ in adopting these technologies. Sure, with a little
startup you take into account the fact that they might not be able to survive,
but with Google you think hey, okay, let's use this thing. And you start
developing your process around it. And then you get burned when it gets
dropped with "Oh well we lost interest, okay we love you, bye bye!".

So today, my guys would have been better off sticking with their lousy wiki
that having switched to Wave (despite the fact that they liked it and felt it
increased their productivity - personally, I never warmed up to it).

Fool me once...

~~~
swombat
Yep, same here. I gave a friggen' talk about Wave at a TechCrunch event. I
used it. I wrote an article about it. Inc.com wrote a "personal viewpoint"
column where they presented me as a Wave supporter.

Google just lost all credibility with me as an early adopter. From now on,
I'll wait 2 years before I start supporting a new Google product, since they
apparently have no staying power.

~~~
frossie
Imagine how these guys feel:

<http://completewaveguide.com/>

------
sofal
Does anyone else here think that Etherpad could have been more successful than
Google Wave?

~~~
durin42
Personally I still use Etherpad more than Wave through the open source
implementation.

------
ary
That was fast. I remember watching the announcement (in person) and wondering
who it was really meant for. At the time it felt like a solution in search of
a problem.

What I _did_ really like was the work they'd done on change-set propagation.
Don't have a link to the session on hand, but it was quite interesting.

~~~
ary
And here it is:

[http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnd...](http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnderTheHood.html)

------
k-zed
Honestly I'm amazed by how unanimously friendly Hacker News (and Reddit) are
to Wave.

It was the anti-suckless - overengineered, XML and web-based, anti-privacy,
pampering users instead of educating them (e.g. in a corporate environment,
using a VCS together with IRC is a much better way to exchange information). I
would've expected at least one contrary voice somewhere :)

I say good riddance.

------
elblanco
It's a nice case study of too much engineering and too much technology, with
far too many unnecessary features to start with, with too much of a roll-out
(the basic feature demo took over 45 minutes) to too few people without nearly
enough thought into actual use cases of a rather complex piece of software
that simply didn't perform that well in real world scenarios.

"What's a Wave?" - should be answerable in a couple of sentences, I don't
think it ever achieved that level of refinement before being put out into the
world.

Even though the basic idea was great, performance of the software in-browser
has never been that great, server performance was problematic, especially when
waves became too long, no export option of collaborate waves to documents, no
real integration with email. Plus it was hard to organize waves. After it went
pseudo-public nothing really new happened to it and old weird problems like
the funky scrollbar were never addressed.

That being said, I've used it on a number of projects, a couple quite big six-
month ordeals, and found it an amazing collaborative environment if you
disciplined your team a bit and organized things well at the start of the
project.

The concept, combining several, different, modes of communication in one
environment is pretty sound actually, I just think that the modes were
combined a little too singularly. Certain things like real-time chat and
document collaboration are fundamentally different things that should have
been relegated to different parts of the interface rather than jammed into one
place.

"But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user
adoption we would have liked." Duh, the rollout was rather botched and given
what I think I've detailed it's no wonder.

"What is Wave" should have been "a document collaboration tool with real-time
side-channel chat and group email" would have been better for the use-cases my
group fell into.

What I was really excited about, and what never seemed to materialize in terms
of a release from Google, was that ability to run my own Wave server and
federate with other Wave servers. _That's_ what I wanted, and what never
happened.

------
boots
What suprises me is the short lifespan of the product to the public before
killing it. While some of us may have had Wave invites for a while, it has
been only been open to the public for less then 3 months.

~~~
theoden
And the vast majority don't even know that it exists.

------
agentultra
I liked it, just didn't like the interface. I was an early adopter and very
excited about the protocol. When I was looking at it, there wasn't enough
client specification to bother working on an alternative client (ie: emacs).
Hopefully that has changed (or will change before Google drops support).

I found it really useful for collaborating with multiple parties. It allowed
us to work on a document and keep the conversation all in one place yet
clearly separated. Sometimes email can make that distinction difficult or
unclear.

At least it's not entirely closed source. :)

~~~
twopoint718
This is what I thought. I wasn't going to pay attention until they specified
the client protocol (Wave _needs_ an Emacs mode). Most of the complaints I've
heard about Wave stemmed from its AJAX-heavy user interface. How many people
had new enough browsers to even use Wave?

------
siglesias
Wave was simply over-developed internally, and by the time it was released it
had evolved an esoteric, private feature set and interface that had suited the
Google beta testers. I for one was simply bewildered by the interface and
found it difficult to incorporate into my workflow.

------
j_baker
I wanted to like wave. It just always seemed like a solution looking for a
problem.

------
furtivefelon
Is it just me or is the source not easily discoverable? I found the wave
protocol sources, but i can't really find the individual components. If anyone
could point me to the right repo it would be much appreciated!

------
antimatter15
I guess my new wave client <http://micro-wave.appspot.com> is a little more
dead.

~~~
agentultra
No, the protocol and a basic server implementation are still open source. You
will need a new provider I guess. Keep it alive!

------
ig1
Given there seems to be real demand for this product, it may well be an
opportunity for a startup to build a competitor.

------
abraham
If Wave was launched with the Gmail integration of Buzz I think we would be
discussing a completely different outcome.

~~~
axod
Is buzz doing any better?

~~~
pavs
I think the problem is two-fold both with Buzz and Wave. First the
implementation and the adoption.

I think Wave idea is awesome, but their implementation (and performance) has
been always an issue. My communication is already fragmented over so many
places I don't want another domain for another form of communication. They
should have added wave into Gmail by default. Wave always had horrible
performance issues (still does).

Buzz doesn't solve any communication problem that I can't use it on any other
popular services. So Buzz adoption doesn't make sense to me whether its
integrated to Gmail or not.

Buzz is a "me too" product. Wave was not.

------
jakevoytko
You can't make people solve problems they don't have. If Google failed with
the Hype Winds at their backs, then I doubt anybody can do it.

~~~
prosa
That's an interesting perspective. I would state it somewhat differently,
though. I think Wave solved _too many_ problems simultaneously, making it
overly complex in some ways and hiding its true utility in others.

------
cedsav
That sucks, we left basecamp/campfire for Google Wave and it was a really good
fit for us (collaborative work with a distributed team).

------
InclinedPlane
I said it before and I'll say it again: wave solved all of the wrong (easy)
problems of communication and failed to tackle any of the hard problems. The
result was a highly polished mashup of existing communication forms based on
cutting edge technology that made for an excellent demo but a very poor (or at
best niche) product. See also: the Segway.

P.S. Re: hard vs. easy problems: Wave tackled some hard challenges in the
implementation space, which I think may have led the engineers into thinking
they were building something innovative and worthwhile. However, the important
bit is whether or not you've actually solved anything in the problem space.

------
sprout
Wave may have been an idea whose time is yet to come.

When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too
slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it.

This was mostly because I was working in a company where getting people to
document was enough of a difficulty without introducing new software. If I'd
worked somewhere with a bunch of early-adopters, it would have been a
fantastic tool.

On the other hand, Wave seems like a tool that almost replicates all of the
benefits of being in the same room as someone. I don't think there's a better
way to do a distributed workplace. (Of course, I haven't tried.)

~~~
thorax
> When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too
> slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it.

Slow? I can only assume people who said this weren't using the latest FF or
Chrome. I've never considered Wave slow at all.

~~~
brg
The Chrome team valiantly tried to incorporate it into our design process, but
stopped using it precisely because it was painfully slow.

------
betterlabs
I don't think Wave as a product failed. I think it failed as a product Google
imagined/wanted it to be. They expected Wave to replace the way we use email.
I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now, after the fact. The tech was cool
and useful but changing consumers habits and especially on something like
communication is very very hard. So I am not really surprised it did not get
adoption. I agree with some of the comments below that if it was integrated
tightly within Gmail, it would worked better and PERHAPS it would helped more
users try it, like it and adopt it ..slowly.

------
mhd
So, that leaves us with 0 popular GWT applications? Or did Google build
anything new / ported something old with it?

------
mike463
I think it was grievously hurt by google's slow-start "invite" thing.

It was a catch-22. You needed people to collaborate with for it to catch on,
but you needed to wait a long time to invite people.

------
dgrant
When more people say "I tried it, haven't really used it though" than "I use
it regularly" you know your product has failed.

~~~
edash
You could say that about Twitter, though, and it's difficult to find anyone
today who considers Twitter a failure.

------
pasbesoin
I wrote this elsewhere; it summarizes my opinion. I'll just add that, in
addition to the below, Google also simply needs to allow sufficient time for
such a new paradigm (albeit an amalgam of many separate, older, established
paradigms) to gain adoption.

\--

I find this quite disappointing. Wave as a concept -- and apparently its
underlying implementation -- is brilliant. It pretty much exactly fixes a
number of significant barriers I've repeatedly, persistently encountered in
professional, collaborative communication.

However, in a fashion that's becoming all too typical for Google, the user
interface was spartan and disjointed to the point of outright sucking for
anyone who was not an "uebergeek" already at least passingly familiar with the
paradigms they were using.

Just like with their Android Nexus phone: They didn't need to improve the
technology further as much as they needed to make it usable for the common
user. In the phone's case, that meant real customer support. In Wave's case,
that meant a meaningful, obvious user interface and much less spartan
documentation, including non-linear textual references and not just so many
overcute, time-consuming, and shared-environment-adverse videos many of which
were broken into frustratingly small snippets. The videos did, I suppose,
demonstrate the dynamic interface better than a bunch of text and static
pictures might, but then this was in significant part the fault of the
interface that gave no visual indicators of what to click or drag, much less
what doing so would accomplish.

Google really should give Wave more time, and devote a small cadre of staff to
fixing the UI, and another small cadre of staff to some coherent, consistent
promotion and public training/documentation. Once people grasp what it can do
and how to do it in a quick, intuitive fashion, I argue they would have users
aplenty. They've already added it as a beta feature to their Google Apps
online office software suite. That crowd is ripe for adoption, if adoption is
made straightforward.

------
jessriedel
Isn't it obvious that the #1 reason wave failed was because it wasn't
backwards compatible with email? If I could I have received all my email over
wave, as well as new waves, I would have started using it immediately. But if
its separate, I have to add yet _another_ thing to check to my life? No
thanks.

------
jyothi
Building community needs evangelizing it, building brand ambassadors out of
your users and most important "listening to your users closely". One needs to
set up a mode of direct conversation. This comes naturally when you start
small like twitter or youtube.

When you have few million user base ready to consume whatever you advertise on
gmail or search - you are trying to buy out of old rewards. Worse users are
non-forgiving and expectations are much high.

So it sounds like a big company problem. But it really isn't. Yahoo does it
really well with yahoo answers. There is even today a high response rate from
yahoo team through "Ask Mike"

Google should probably consider small teams within. Provide all the support
through tech and hardware but let the teams launch these products on their own
and grow the userbase naturally focusing on service too along with the
product.

------
newmediaclay
Google put absolutely 0 muscle behind this product. Android got front page
placement on Google and it has now overtaken iPhone. They either didn't truly
believe in Wave or the marketing team just made a huge gaffe by not even
making a half ass attempt to push this product to the consumer world.

------
gcheong
Microsoft Bobs. Google Waves.

~~~
lesswavy
Apple OpenDocs.

------
slavin
i don't get which problem was it solving. is it cool that they've introduced
character-by-character typing? well, kinda.. but is it useful at all?

it's also cool (for someone) that it looks like a desktop app, but is it
needed? it's maybe cool that i have all my contacts from gmail there, but do i
need this? i mean i don't even get why would i think of my gmail as a social
network, it's my inbox, and it's fine for what it does.

I mean its hard not to appreciate people trying to innovate, but it actually
has to solve some sort of problem.. or maybe it's just me not getting the
concept (however it's still so much more interesting than all these buzz,
rule.fm etc)

~~~
swombat
I wrote an article on the topic back then:

<http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html>

"What problems does Google Wave solve?"

Wave solved many problems. Google are idiots to axe it after barely a year and
a half.

------
kmilden
Google needs to focus on their core competency which is search. Instead of
competing with everyone they should find ways to integrate their search engine
into everything. It boggles my mind we don't integrate Google search into
everything like we do with the Twitter API. If they continually strive for
second place in every category they may one day find themselves second in
search as well. Wave is just another lesson in the long string of failures
they will continue to produced until they get back to what made them great in
the first place.

------
noodle
unfortunate. it was a good product, for the right market, but it was overhyped
and it underdelivered.

~~~
intranation
And what was the market, exactly?

Seems to me that not a single person I knew actually wanted to use it, or
thought it filled a niche they needed filling.

~~~
noodle
its my understanding groups that had to do a high level of collaboration
across several people found it pretty useful. i know some people that still
use it for this and are happy, although i'm sure that if it closes down,
they'll find another product and carry on.

------
jonhohle
I used Google wave for feature/ticket tracking. The only thing I could fault
it for was the wacky interface which didn't always work correctly. It was nice
to have a hosted, free ticket tracking app that did just enough to get by for
that purpose (for personal use I don't need anything as complicated as
Redmine, Trak, or Bugzilla; don't have much desire to host my own app; and I'm
too cheap to pay someone to host something I could do myself).

Now I'll have to move all of that state somewhere else.

------
prs
Based on the initial reactions to the first Google Wave demonstration by a few
non-tech friends of mine I thought Google Wave might gain the necessary
product adoption and momentum. I erred and so did many other folks.

I applaud Google for their willingness to stop investing precious development
resources in something that looked like the next big thing but turned out to
be a great product without consumer approval.

------
linaceballos
It was time. That´s true that "You can't make people solve problems they don't
have". But the idea was excellent,maybe later can work.

------
mark_l_watson
That is sad - I have written a few Wave Robots and wrote an article on Wave. I
never thought of it as a user-facing system as-is, but instead liked it as a
development platform. I probably invested a little less than 80 hours playing
with Wave and writing Robots, and I think it was time fairly well spent, even
if Wave is going away.

------
rue
Excellent. Wave was made using obsolete technology and some wrong choices made
it in regarding push vs. pull, distribution, modularity, "social
mediafication" and encryption among other things.

There were some good things about it, and Hopefully we will now see some real
contenders rise up to tackle the Future of Communication(tm).

Preferrably not from Google. Sorry.

------
InfinityX0
This was Wave's failure: One year after release (and having never used it), I
still don't really know what it does.

------
scotty79
Can't they just stop improving it and keep it running? It's not like they need
to save their server resources.

------
elv
I think Wave is a creative and full of effort generalization of a basic idea:
adding something to GMail to promote online work coordination and cooperation.
They went way too far and they realized it. I would, istread of throwing
everything away, rework the concept and see what can come out.

------
Dylanfm
Understandable, but still a shame.

We've got a wave going with about 14 people planning our trips to Ruby Kaigi
in a few weeks. It's working really well and has definitely provided value
that would be tricky to find elsewhere.

Could Wave have worked better if it targeted a vertical? Or is that not how
Google does things?

------
watmough
Is this the same thing as Buzz?

If I want to 'connect' with friends, I have Facebook, and if I want to im work
colleagues, I have Yahoo and MSN.

For document collaboration I have email for non-realtime, Google Docs for near
and actual real-time.

I have a hard time seeing where my workflow needs any more collaboration
tools.

------
dmnd
I wonder if the team can continue working on an open source implementation in
their 20% time.

------
fauigerzigerk
I think the reason for Wave's failure is simpler than most posts here suggest.
Wave was just way too complicated as an end user tool. It is a technology
wanting to be an application. I hope it can live on as a technology underlying
real applications.

------
ilovecomputers
They should really reprint this shirt, in light of this announcement, for
hipsters to wear.

[http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-
shirts...](http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts-sale/)

------
lwhi
Wave was a bit too sci-fi. A bit too ahead of its time maybe. Maybe it's best
if the technology is split up and spoon-fed to the general population ... that
way people can get a taste. I think change needs to be incremental.

------
lionhearted
That's a shame. I'd have used it if other friends and colleagues adopted it,
it was pretty good at what it did. I think the issue was that it didn't solve
any big enough problems for people to encourage them to get on.

------
vidar
Everything that distracts from Google Me is obviously being shut down.

~~~
DotSauce
I don't know what other services you're referring to, but that was my first
thought.

------
speleding
A year is really short to get a revolutionary way of working to catch on. Why
give up so easily? Maybe they couldn't figure out a working business model for
this one.

------
c1sc0
This makes me feel a little better about the time when I sat on tons of
invites & never really got around to using Wave. I'm one of those who never
grokked wave.

------
thebootstrapper
Google also wanted it to be tool for all the enterprise, what will happen to
other implementation of Google wave for enterprises, for example say Novel's
pulse?

------
jpablo
I was thinking about this recently:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223>

------
senthilnayagam
google wave is dead because of google.

google provided limited accounts and google wave requests was being sold, so
the hype got created.

overcommit and underdelivery, 2009 was not 2004, gmail style launch for wave
was the first nail in the coffin

though you have your account, your friends dont, you were waiting alone, it
was not the realtime communications I expected. what do I do, leave google
wave, this has happened with so many people whom I know.

------
antimatter15
I guess my new wave client is even more dead. <http://micro-wave.appspot.com>

------
harscoat
innovative technology feels like art sometimes, it should exist for the sake
of it. "L'art pour l'art", Innovation for innovation!

------
googler
I wonder how much pressure for canceling such an ambitious product came from
people invested in the Apps team?

------
flipbrad
This was a product worthy of being spun out into a standalone company, free to
pitch at the corporate market

------
zandorg
They blew it big time by hyping it for RPGs, which never went anywhere.

Get the RPGers on board, perhaps, and you can succeed.

~~~
brown9-2
They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for,
making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration
with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no
integration with gmail!).

~~~
spydez
...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know.

They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day,
but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added.

And this way works with all email, not just gmail!

There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much
integration do you want, exactly?

~~~
gecko
While you're correct, that option was added _far_ too late. By the time that
option was added, everyone in my organization had tried Wave and then given up
on it. I revived its use in the last week, successfully, with that option,
only to see that it's now going to die anyway.

Really, all of Wave can be summarized by the fact that, at its launch, Wave
deliberately refused to participate in any existing communications medium
other than Wave. This meant that everyone you cared about had to get on Wave.
Since that couldn't possibly happen, Wave was doomed from the start. Nothing
about today's announcement is remotely a surprise to me.

~~~
fragmede
It also sucked. You would get an email that _something_ changed, and the
context given was the first message/blip/whatever in the wave instead of the
message added at the end. It was a huge let down to log into wave just to read
'yeah' as the entirety of the update. Leaving me to ignore wave update emails
even more.

------
signa11
to me it seems that google-wave could not gather enough user adoption
_precisely_ because it was invite only. gmail could get away with it, because
the _nature_ of email 'collaboration' (sic) doesn't mandate both endpoints to
be gmail.

whatever the reason, kind of sad anyways.

------
lakeeffect
I think adobe connect is the way to go, as far as corporate collaboration
tools.

------
justlearning
Ouch Etherpad guys!

Perhaps Google is coming out with WaveDocs (wave integrated google docs) soon?

------
ritonlajoie
in two words : It was a good idea, but badly implemented. I'm not telling I
would have done a better job than their engineers, but just have a look at the
slow interface they made, and you will get my point..

------
known
To tell you the truth I anticipated this when Google first launched it.

------
ashishbharthi
"See my comments in RED" still rocks.

------
keefe
oh no but at least I can cross checkout google wave in detail from my
todo......

------
psycandrew
Ouch!

------
helwr
long live the Wave.

the time is right for a New Wave startup

------
Charuru
The idea is excellent, the fail is the lack of 'product'. They should
distribute Wave modules that every wordpress or phpbb user can install on
their blogs and hook into their own communities... and then Wave will take
off.

~~~
Timothee
To me, the big problem was indeed the lack of a product. I have tried Google
Wave and I don't know what "product" they're talking about. It seemed to be an
interesting technological experiment but I wouldn't be able to tell you what
it's for, what problem it solves, or anything besides the fact that
technologically, it was interesting.

In fact, I'm kind of surprised that they're killing it, because it felt like a
first step with the technology part, with an upcoming second step where they
would use said technology. I'm surprised that that was it. I would have
expected Google to have plans beyond what Wave is today.

------
robwgibbons
Crap. How can I host my own?

------
c00p3r
yet another hint that google have seen its better days..

