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> if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editin

> if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.) As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug. I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.

pasbesoin 9y ago
Yes, it was a Javascript nightmare, in terms of performance then and on then equipment. Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts. As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs. I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE. Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails. Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap. I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration. Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Yes, it was a Javascript nightmare, in terms of performance then and on then equipment. Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts. As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs. I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE. Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails. Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap. I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration. Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.