The Google Wave That Crashed. ⇒
10 August 2010, mid-morning
I think Wave is simply a case where Google’s get-it-out-there-early mentality failed. Because the product was somewhat complex and Google itself didn’t know what to do with it, or how to pitch it, it flopped. It really is that simple.
I think Google should have done a better job at explaining the different problems Wave solved. I’m a fairly tech-savvy person and even I found Wave confusing and poorly thought out. It was also quite slow, especially when compared to their other web-applications. My friends and I were using Wave to coordinate our D&D games. It worked fairly well for that purpose, but I wouldn’t say it was a joy to use.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
It had this tech-demo aspect. I think on the one hand there was a failure of marketing, where the marketing raised expectations the product could not meet. The exclusive-invite-required launch was also not a good idea for a product that required one’s friends’ participation to be useful. And finally I wonder if they had really thought out the point of it. It struck me as a real-time text document collaboration tool (I couldn’t use it for video, for example), and so I’m not sure it should have been a separate product from google docs.
by D on August 10 2010, 11:59 am #
I think they should have pushed it as an evolution of Google Docs. That is how my friends and I used it. The fact that you could edit anything and everything — even other people’s ‘waves’ — really makes the service nothing like email as most people would understand it. I think over-hyping Wave as the future of email was a bad move. Really over-hyping the product period was a silly idea. I’m guessing they will move features from Wave into other Google products. It has that crazy spell-checker.
by ramanan on August 10 2010, 1:47 pm #
I don’t remember the spell checker. I guess my spelling is too fucking tight.
by D on August 11 2010, 1:08 am #
That was actually me editing all of your Waves while you were typing, Ram.
by Dave on August 12 2010, 8:14 am #