"The reason they decided to go with Google was that they were literally overwhelmed by Wave: after meeting the Wave guys, they were so impressed that they (a) wanted to work on Wave themselves, and (b) didn't want to compete with it. "
To me it looks like they're burning down a simple product people love -- to go work on a bloated product people are at best ambivalent about.
Sure, they could end up bringing their spark to Wave and making it into something that all the Etherpad users will love even more, but what do you think the odds of that are? Why kill Etherpad before that happens?
To me it sounds like you're so eager to complain that you're jumping to conclusions in order to complain about them. Why don't you just wait and see what happens?
I really do hope they're successful in taming Wave's UI complexity and making it actually useful for writing documents collaboratively. Right now Wave is geared towards adding commentary (which it does well), but that isn't very useful if you don't already have a mostly-complete document to mark up. Even with just one editor Wave can be really obnoxious if you try to write something more than a paragraph in one blurb -- it could really use an Etherpad mode!
As someone who's bet on Appjet before, what odds would you give of them pulling that off at Google? By tearing down Etherpad, they've clearly gone all in, but there's a substantial team on multiple continents working on Wave, and they're already set in some rather weird ways that the Appjet guys would have to reform significantly.
Do you understand how their users would be at least apprehensive about this? I should have bought a private copy when I had the chance...
I do have faith that they'll make a splash on the Wave team, but I doubt that they'll be able to fix Wave so that it's a good Etherpad replacement in the next three months.
Personally the best case I can see for wave is that some of the features get absorbed into GMail. I can't see it succeeding on its own.
(I just tried it out for the first time). Horrible bloated slow UI, hideous scrollbars, and pretty underwhelming.
It didn't seem to solve any problems I had.
So thinking about real useful features people want, how about they add a 'collaborate on email' mode in gmail, where you can write etherpad style email drafts with other people and when you're all happy, click send. I'd rather they work on things people want like that.
I am curious, wasn't AppJet JVM based (using Rhino for Javascript)? Why couldn't they offer support for Ruby via JRuby? Would have been a language that's both much more pleasant to work than PHP and has great traction with web developer community. Was there a switch away from JVM/Rhino to a C/V8 based solution?
I hope you don't expect me to have that information, although it's reasonable to assume that if their first attempt was purely javascript based, that they had a certain intellectual investment into the language. I'm not sure what would have been gained by switching to Ruby. PHP is problematic in many ways, not only language but also runtime and lack of asynchronous I/O.
Didn't expect you to have that information, was just more general posturing. I complete agree with you on PHP.
Ruby would have been useful in that it runs very well on the JVM (their product runs Javascript in a JVM container), but is pretty popular amongst web developers (you could also argue, with the right kind of web developers; PHP developers prefer to just use shared hosting in any case).
This is totally ridiculous: build something to throw it away and get job at Google ? Blah. This does not have anything in common neither with business nor with entrepreneurship.
I think a good chunk of people here aren't looking to build a conventional business. Most are looking to (firstly) hack on something they find interesting and if the constellations are aligned right, make enough in an exit to be able to freely choose where/when they work (given "liquidity preferences", the latter would also imply "generate a non-trivial return for their investors", which ends up being used to back other ventures).
I'd imagine this gives them:
a) far more leverage to choose their projects at Google (if you're entering Google in a conventional way, you aren't even told what projects/team you will be working until your start date: you could interview hoping to work on search, but end up working on internal/IT applications)
b) enough money, so that after their stock vests at Google they'd wouldn't have to work.
You are right, however, that is very different from traditional entrepreneurship or business.
well it seems like their technology is extremely valuable as well, since from what i've been reading on HN, they blow the socks off all would-be competitors
The technology isn't hard. I know 'real time' is ridiculously over hyped now, but it's not rocket science. I'd expect quite a few etherpad clones to popup.
It's exciting that they were so impressed with Wave. It's easy to overlook the potential of Wave in its current incarnation, but this, to me, suggests there is some seriously awesome stuff coming to the Wave platform.
These guys created Etherpad, and they are excited by Wave... ergo, so am I!
