Whats funny is that Google Wave was basically a direct predecessor to these types of apps and they killed it before the technology really had a chance to catch up to the vision.
Yes! I'm so glad somebody else remembers Wave, it seems to have disappeared into the dustbin of history. I loved Wave before it was killed, and while I know a lot of people still hold grudges over Reader, Wave is the axed Google product I miss most. The fact that you could have multiple threaded conversations in the same chat room was one of the best features for me, and Teams seems like the first descendant to have that. That alone is a plus over Slack.
I wish instead of just throwing it at the world, hoping for people to figure out what to do with it, Google had used it as infrastructure to build a variety of applications.
The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google shut it down. I still don't think there is a good equivalent to wave at the moment.
> The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google shut it down.
Yeah, this tallies with my experience. I was in two separate Wave teams (Waves?), one for a six-person software team and one for a large-ish social group of non-technical people. The software team took to it immediately and loved it; the social group was mostly baffled and used it sparingly.
If Google had only iterated on it they'd be a in a great spot right now, but I guess eventually every big technology company has their "Microsoft moment" when they kill a product only to see that category take off years later.
Thinking about it, i feel that Wave shutting down was a turning point for Google.
It was built on XMPP, and allowed anyone to spin up their own Wave server that could talk to any other such server (iirc).
At the time Google (and also Facebook) used XMPP as the backend for their messaging service, and was even working on a extension for video and voice communications (libjingle?).
But then all that was scuttled, and they moved the messaging onto the proprietary Hangout. I guess they could not figure out how to monetize a distributed system like XMPP and instead switched to putting everything in a silo.
Then again, Hangout was tied closely to G+, and G+ was the brainchild of a ex-MS exec that was described as a "cookie licker" (meaning he would try to tie whatever other projects he learned about into his own) after his departure from Google.
The turning point was when Larry Page became CEO. For years Google tried to beat Facebook with open specs/protocols like XMPP, but there was also Activity Streams and others (PubSubHubbub). None of those really took off.
I think Larry Page made the company more product focused and a few successes, like Hangouts, "validated" that it was the better approach than focusing on open protocols.
My recollection was that it never even saw a proper 1.0 release before it was killed a year after announcement. I'd love to read an insider post-mortem of what happened there.
> they killed it before the technology really had a chance to catch up to the vision
Nah! Google wave would be a massive failure even today. Google simply does not understand other people. Why on earth was Google Wave "invites based" ? Imagine Slack being invite based do you think it would have worked ?
If Google Wave was an enterprise produce Google should have marketed it that way. They did not. I did not even understand WTF it was in first place.
I dont want my boss to see the reply I am drafting for heavens sake. It was like they built id to show how good engieers they were.
I never really thought of it like that, but you're absolutely right! IF only they'd followed through and tweaked their vision.. of what google wave was, or pivoted in the right way.
