So Google Wave finally came crashing down. The reason according to Google is, not surprisingly, that Wave “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,”. I guess we all know that.
Not to long ago, I wrote a post in defense of Wave. My main thesis was that Wave is not a service, but a technology set, and as such, an interesting one. As a separate service however, it just didn’t catch on. The implementation of this technology was just not sharp enough, and branding it as an alternative to the master dragon of the web universe, email, was not the smartest thing to do.
What is interesting though is viewing it as a technology. Because, after all, the best parts of Wave like real time character by character updates and drag and drop functionality is already in place in Google Docs instead. Google also releases the technology as open source, which opens up to further innovation.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that Wave is “useless” and “crap” and all kinds of other things. I don’t agree. I think that it carries important innovations that we’ll see in use in all kinds of implementations in the future. It’s like a research project where the conclusions and results can be used for further research and creative commercial implementation.
So Google, I salute your brave venture into the unknown. Like Columbus, you may not have ended up exactly where you thought, but really, when do we ever do that in innovation projects? Who knew in advance what Twitter would amount to for example? Without projects like this one we’d all be stone age savages.
Thank you!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Failures are often more important than semi succcess. This was a grand failure on the service side, but has great benefits in moving the web technology forward. Wave was not great, but the legacy may very well be.
Hi Walter,
I share your view that Google Wave was never really a service. It was thrown out into the world without any clear unique selling point.
Perhaps it was hard to market it. I get the feeling that google is trying it’s darnest to compete with facebook and twitter by either throwing cash at these pet projects or through social media acquisitions.