7 ms·

How the engineer driven culture at Google damaged Wave

72 points by fogus 16y ago

api 16y ago
I remember reading a paper a long time ago about traffic engineering. It turns out that when there's a traffic problem you have three choices more or less: 1) Add something 2) Change something 3) Remove something The paper talked about how most civil engineers have a strong bias toward 1, followed by 2, and then rarely 3. The first thought is almost always to add something. Something is wrong? That means we need something more to solve it, right? Complexity is not a virtue. It's actually a vice and a liability. It is better to solve a problem by removing something than by adding something. This (along with losing sight of what customers want) is the problem with engineer-driven design. Engineers like to add stuff, not remove stuff. Wave always looked horridly over-complex to me. The protocol was a tower of babel. It was "open," but it was so complex that nobody would bother climbing its learning curve. It tried to solve too many problems at once, it was slow, and it was cumbersome to use. Those are all signs of over-engineering.
- smakz 16y ago
  Very good points. Reminds me of this quote: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more credibility to Google Docs. Similar situations are going on right now with Google Buzz and even Google Mail, the execution of the "make phone calls from your mail box" seems to leave a lot to be desired. It's a feature that tries to jump out at you and grab your attention as if saying "Hey look at this, we invented something new" when really it should be almost invisible until you need to use it.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Doesn't this imply that _nothing_ is always perfection. The quote just seems to be flat out wrong. While maybe not as elegant, but wouldn't it be better said as "Perfection is achieved, not where is nothing more to add, but when there is neither more to add nor anything to take away". Maybe the quote has a proceeding sentence that makes it clear.
    - barrkel 16y ago
      The assumption is that you're talking about some thing - design, work of art, whatever - which is accomplishing some goal. The perfection lies in removing extraneous elements without stopping it from achieving the goal. Nothing, by itself, doesn't achieve much.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        Still, even your explanation is wrong. There are obviously times when adding something is required. If a car with no engine, I need to add one. I can't simply remove a wheel.
        daleharvey 16y ago
        as he already said, it has to accomplish some goal, if your goal is for your car to drive, it needs an engine.
        kenjackson 16y ago
        OK, put a lawnmower engine in a Hummer... Now this simply becomes an exercise in requirements gathering. Because your retort will be the goal is this accerlation curve, this torque curver, this gas mileage, etc.... And this presumes that the requirements lead to perfection. What is the goal of the Mona Lisa or Dante's Inferno? Could Micaelangelo have done less to satisfy the requirements for the Creation of Adam? Can you point to any value in that quote? And let me extend my last question. How many things can you list that would be perfect merely by removing things? I don't think there are many. I suspect most things, that even accomplish a goal, lack perfection due to an array of things, not simply due to having too much of anything.
- sz 16y ago
  "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" [Einstein] is my favorite quote of all time.
- enjo 16y ago
  Is that true? In my experience (software) engineers love to rewrite things:)
georgecmu 16y ago
Google is like grad-school. People value working on hard problems, and doing them right. Things are pretty polished, the code is usually solid[...] Wow, that sounds nothing like grad school. Or any research environment, for that matter.
- angstrom 16y ago
  Yeah really. Does that mean the code is littered with "Left as an exercise for the reader."?
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    In this case, the "reader" being the compiler?
- arethuza 16y ago
  I'd agree with that - I remember a control engineer telling me that the "clever" bit of systems was actually implemented in about 1% of the code. All the rest of the stuff was boring as he was concerned, but was the bit that was actually necessary to make stuff work in messy industrial environments. In an academic research environment you only worry about that 1% - the rest is irrelevant to getting something published. [NB I worked in academic research for six years - mostly on engineering related topics]
houseabsolute 16y ago
Does anyone actually know Dare Abasanjo as "Carnage4Life" or is that just his years-long ploy to annoy me and undermine his credibility in any forum of consequence?
- ibagrak 16y ago
  I went to Georgia Tech undergrad at about the same time as Dare (I graduated in 2004). If my memory serves, he was using carnage4life handle even back in 2002.
Experimentalist 16y ago
I'm glad to see a post highlighted here which shows the limits of bright engineers and hacking in a business. Google Wave is just one high profile example.. Being full of engineering-minded people, Hacker News has a strong bias favoring the idea that if you hack away and create an interesting piece of technology, then that is what is required for a successful startup business. That idea is wrong. That idea is more of a love of inventing and obsession over technology rather than successful business. A successful business doesn;t need neat technology or having brilliant engineers. It requires a product/service meeting consumer demand at the right time in a sustainable way at a cost that enables a profit for the business. That's where Google Wave failed. Despite a huge financial backing in engineering and promotion, people didn't want it. The core for a successful business is not innovative technology-- it's Business Operations. If the business operations are wrong -- ie a product isn't fulfilling a consumer demand or has an sunsustainable cost-- then the startup is going to tank. (unless angel investors keep throwing money at it, but eventually they won't anymore) On the other hand... if the business operations are right, ie. there is strong sustainable consumer demand for the product/service and a cost enabling a profit, then the the company will prosper regardless if the engineers are decent, great or so-so. There are plenty of companies making good profits year after year, growing there business and equity sustainably, which have just ok engineers and average non-innovative software. It would be nice to see more startup-related articles here on Hacker News showing technology failures, not wasting money on too much engineering and the importance of the business operations side of things.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  You are 100% right but that's not a popular view around here. All it takes is two guys and two laptops. I think in part that is because with YCs backing the two guys with laptops actually stand a chance of success. If the two guys with laptops had to make it 'on their own' it would turn out to be a lot harder.
- DannoHung 16y ago
  So you want to read about companies with no competitive advantages anywhere in the organization? Maybe some big firm that uses its marketshare to enforce a significant amount of revenue as opposed to better handling of operations, marketing, R&D, customer support, sales, etc?
tlammens 16y ago
Wave as is may be dead, the technology will live on in other google products. Introducing it as a big bang was maybe not the best way, too much change at a time. But gradually it will emerge in another form.
motters 16y ago
This seems pretty much like a straw man argument. The notion that Facebook concentrates upon user experience, given all the privacy wrangling and complaints about the user interface being needlessly changed or being too convoluted, seems to be not very well founded. Fundamentally the concept of Wave seemed good, and I think there is (or will be in future) a demand for something better than email which consolidates email, instant messaging, microblogging and some project/time management features into a single interface. I think what happened with Wave was not that they concentrated too much upon the engineering but precisely the opposite. If they had spent more time engineering a slick, fast system which scales to large multi-user conversations without crashing or grinding to a halt and integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition then there would have been a much bigger chance of Wave becoming a success.
- docgnome 16y ago
  "...integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition..." Nail on the head. That is exactly why I didn't use wave more than a handful of times even though I rather like it. If I'm the only person who uses the email when everyone else uses snail mail, it's not really very useful.
dmitri1981 16y ago
I've read similar arguments here being leveled at Microsoft. Given their strong culture and hiring practices they ended up hiring people who were strong engineers. At the same time that resulted in the company developing blind spots in areas where a different approach would have been more beneficial. I guess the risk is that when you end up phenomenally successful using a particular method, it becomes very difficult to go against that ingrained culture and try doing things a different way. Best example of a company combating that issue, in my opinion, is the IBM PC, where they gave Don Estridge free reign to carry out the project outside the normal operating procedures of the company which the management realised would have destroyed any chances of the project becoming a success.
- waqf 16y ago
  http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/ http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/ It's not a metaphor about monarchs, but about horses ... but I guess nobody knows what those are anymore.
moultano 16y ago
This post is pretty much information-free. This seems to be his only criticism of the product, and it isn't even correct: >It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email. This was explicitly thought about. The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting. The perceived problem is that most of the time people spend chatting is waiting for the other person to finish typing. No one quite knew what sort of social effects this would have, but by taking a poll they would have just built a "faster horse."
- Elepsis 16y ago
  Really? ICQ built character by character typing all the way back in the late 90s, and users back then stumbled across basically all of the same landmines Google Wave exposed. The issue is that the problem Google's engineers perceived simply did not exist. The latency of waiting 30 seconds for a person to finish forming their thought into something coherent just isn't something worth overcoming.
- elblanco 16y ago
  Every single person I know who used Wave thought the character-by-character thing was terrible and wanted it turned off. A few of them actually stopped using it as soon as they realized it did this since they didn't want to broadcast half-formed thoughts to the world.
  - moultano 16y ago
    I'm not saying it was the right decision, but the thesis that they didn't think about it because they're engineers just isn't true.
  - benno 16y ago
    Broadcasting half-formed thoughts can be desirable; we do it everyday when talking face-to-face.
10ren 16y ago
The second section discusses SOAP/REST and XML/JSON, saying that XML Schema attempted to solve two problems (document formats + object wire format), but it predictably became too complex. He claims that we now use REST (not SOAP) and JSON (not XML), so the "impedance mismatch" problem is now solved. Is this true? JSON is used mainly where there is Javascript (ie. client side webpages - though that is becoming more and more inclusive these days... almost everything is a webapp (exceptions?)) - but it's schemaless (or typeless). While this is popular (eg key-value NoSQL stores, and dynamic typing in Ruby, Python, Perl), it's not right for everything. If you did want typed data, you'd probably just use XML Schema, since everything is already there. I ask because of a startup idea based on XML Schema. It could survive XML Schema going away, but I'm not so sure about the apparent long-term trend away from schemas/types altogether. With fast-enough computers to nullify the speed advantage of static types, will the remaining advantage of type-safety be valuable enough on its own - What is the evidence for and against? Even databases are going schemaless (it seems).
- arebop 16y ago
  If I wanted typed data, I would be more inclined to use RelaxNG than XML Schema. In some situations, XML might not be so advantageous. JSON is quite convenient for JavaScript applications. Protocol Buffers have an efficient wire representation. I think his point of JSON vs. XML is that JSON is simpler because it is designed specifically for representing structured data exchanged among JavaScript programs. Sure, it can be used from other languages and read by humans, but the design goal was much more narrowly circumscribed than the design goals of SGML, XML, and XML-Schema. The argument about SOAP vs. REST is not as well-developed, but I think he's saying that SOAP was doomed by its attempt to stretch XML to serve one too many masters. Personally though I see REST as a set of principles more than an RPC standard. It seems to me that REST's success is due both to the evolutionary manner in which it developed, and the relatively simple architectural form it takes compared to the SOAP/WS-* protocol specifications.
sandipagr 16y ago
the reason wave failed was cause it was not integrated with gmail! It's that simple. All the rest of the arguments are just killing the dead animal
thisorthat 16y ago
Google Wave could have been great if it was not designed by engineers.It amazes me that such a giant company does not put more effort into design and usability.
ewanmcteagle 16y ago
Google Wave... whatever. What annoys me is that we lost etherpad for this. That was a really effective product.
drawkbox 16y ago
Because a marketing/business driven product has never failed before... Also wasn't this part of the newer Google that looked better and was primarily more product/marketing/suits driven like Buzz? If it was engineering culture that killed Wave, engineers are ok with failing to make something better or to analyze it. Later perfecting it for a solid product/system. I believe the product failed in the way they released it and that Google may have found the limit for how connected people want to be. Cool as it was, Wave seemed exhausting and we don't need to see people type each letter. Waves happen naturally on the web, twitter, facebook etc. Google hurried the response to that. I do believe many components will be reused on Google.me. Also I wonder if they have any issue with GWT now that they are being sued for Java licensing on Android.
aufreak3 16y ago
Frankly, this is just punditry. Nothing wrong with trying something and failing at it and moving on cutting your losses short. I give google the credit for choosing to fail this way instead of failing with, say, marketing efforts.
ddelony 16y ago
Google's non-search products are really just research projects.
- nanairo 16y ago
  Why? You offered a non-obvious assessment without any evidence or argumentation. Personally I think you are completely wrong. Google is in the business of targeted ads. For that they need infos about the user. Everything else is just a trap to get you to tell them a bit about yourself. Helping you in your searches, is as important as knowing what and who you email. Facebook, who is also entering the same market, is giving them food for thought exactly because of that. Facebook offers almost no search, but they get your infos from other means. From Google's perspective the end result is similar.
  - ddelony 16y ago
    I'm not knocking Google in any way. It's just that, as the article says, Google seems to be developing their new products because thee engineers think they're cool, regardless of whether they're actually commercial. In this way, Google is the Bell Labs of the 21st century.
    - drawkbox 16y ago
      Lots of good stuff came out of Bell Labs, modern software being one of them, C++ another. Lots of things you are looking at right now while at your computer were influenced by Bell Labs.
      - ddelony 16y ago
        I have enormous respect for Bell Labs, at least until they decided to kill non telecommunications projects.
resdirector 16y ago
When I read that they'd made their Google Wave API before they had user-adoption, I thought gee, they've got their priorities wrong.
tybris 16y ago
Did Google Wave fail? I thought it just started? Google mainly suffers from people (including those at Google) thinking that everything they do will be big from day 1. Even though that never happened to any of their other products.
- nanairo 16y ago
  You think? I thought exactly the opposite. The problem of Google to me seems to be that they release something they think it's good enough and then just leave it there hoping that time will prove them right. Then one day they wake up and see there has not been any adoption, and kill it. When Google releases something they are hardly all behind it, and seem to forget about it in a week.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    In that case, they are suffering from the same internal-politics fratricide that Microsoft has been long suffering from. I'm wondering if Google is at the peak of their innovation curve?
stcredzero 16y ago
It's not only Wave!

72 points by fogus 16y ago

api 16y ago

I remember reading a paper a long time ago about traffic engineering. It turns out that when there's a traffic problem you have three choices more or less: 1) Add something 2) Change something 3) Remove something The paper talked about how most civil engineers have a strong bias toward 1, followed by 2, and then rarely 3. The first thought is almost always to add something. Something is wrong? That means we need something more to solve it, right? Complexity is not a virtue. It's actually a vice and a liability. It is better to solve a problem by removing something than by adding something. This (along with losing sight of what customers want) is the problem with engineer-driven design. Engineers like to add stuff, not remove stuff. Wave always looked horridly over-complex to me. The protocol was a tower of babel. It was "open," but it was so complex that nobody would bother climbing its learning curve. It tried to solve too many problems at once, it was slow, and it was cumbersome to use. Those are all signs of over-engineering.

smakz 16y ago
Very good points. Reminds me of this quote: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more credibility to Google Docs. Similar situations are going on right now with Google Buzz and even Google Mail, the execution of the "make phone calls from your mail box" seems to leave a lot to be desired. It's a feature that tries to jump out at you and grab your attention as if saying "Hey look at this, we invented something new" when really it should be almost invisible until you need to use it.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Doesn't this imply that _nothing_ is always perfection. The quote just seems to be flat out wrong. While maybe not as elegant, but wouldn't it be better said as "Perfection is achieved, not where is nothing more to add, but when there is neither more to add nor anything to take away". Maybe the quote has a proceeding sentence that makes it clear.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    The assumption is that you're talking about some thing - design, work of art, whatever - which is accomplishing some goal. The perfection lies in removing extraneous elements without stopping it from achieving the goal. Nothing, by itself, doesn't achieve much.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Still, even your explanation is wrong. There are obviously times when adding something is required. If a car with no engine, I need to add one. I can't simply remove a wheel.
      - daleharvey 16y ago
        as he already said, it has to accomplish some goal, if your goal is for your car to drive, it needs an engine.
        kenjackson 16y ago
        OK, put a lawnmower engine in a Hummer... Now this simply becomes an exercise in requirements gathering. Because your retort will be the goal is this accerlation curve, this torque curver, this gas mileage, etc.... And this presumes that the requirements lead to perfection. What is the goal of the Mona Lisa or Dante's Inferno? Could Micaelangelo have done less to satisfy the requirements for the Creation of Adam? Can you point to any value in that quote? And let me extend my last question. How many things can you list that would be perfect merely by removing things? I don't think there are many. I suspect most things, that even accomplish a goal, lack perfection due to an array of things, not simply due to having too much of anything.
sz 16y ago
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" [Einstein] is my favorite quote of all time.
enjo 16y ago
Is that true? In my experience (software) engineers love to rewrite things:)

georgecmu 16y ago

Google is like grad-school. People value working on hard problems, and doing them right. Things are pretty polished, the code is usually solid[...] Wow, that sounds nothing like grad school. Or any research environment, for that matter.

angstrom 16y ago
Yeah really. Does that mean the code is littered with "Left as an exercise for the reader."?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  In this case, the "reader" being the compiler?
arethuza 16y ago
I'd agree with that - I remember a control engineer telling me that the "clever" bit of systems was actually implemented in about 1% of the code. All the rest of the stuff was boring as he was concerned, but was the bit that was actually necessary to make stuff work in messy industrial environments. In an academic research environment you only worry about that 1% - the rest is irrelevant to getting something published. [NB I worked in academic research for six years - mostly on engineering related topics]

houseabsolute 16y ago

Does anyone actually know Dare Abasanjo as "Carnage4Life" or is that just his years-long ploy to annoy me and undermine his credibility in any forum of consequence?

ibagrak 16y ago
I went to Georgia Tech undergrad at about the same time as Dare (I graduated in 2004). If my memory serves, he was using carnage4life handle even back in 2002.

Experimentalist 16y ago

I'm glad to see a post highlighted here which shows the limits of bright engineers and hacking in a business. Google Wave is just one high profile example.. Being full of engineering-minded people, Hacker News has a strong bias favoring the idea that if you hack away and create an interesting piece of technology, then that is what is required for a successful startup business. That idea is wrong. That idea is more of a love of inventing and obsession over technology rather than successful business. A successful business doesn;t need neat technology or having brilliant engineers. It requires a product/service meeting consumer demand at the right time in a sustainable way at a cost that enables a profit for the business. That's where Google Wave failed. Despite a huge financial backing in engineering and promotion, people didn't want it. The core for a successful business is not innovative technology-- it's Business Operations. If the business operations are wrong -- ie a product isn't fulfilling a consumer demand or has an sunsustainable cost-- then the startup is going to tank. (unless angel investors keep throwing money at it, but eventually they won't anymore) On the other hand... if the business operations are right, ie. there is strong sustainable consumer demand for the product/service and a cost enabling a profit, then the the company will prosper regardless if the engineers are decent, great or so-so. There are plenty of companies making good profits year after year, growing there business and equity sustainably, which have just ok engineers and average non-innovative software. It would be nice to see more startup-related articles here on Hacker News showing technology failures, not wasting money on too much engineering and the importance of the business operations side of things.

jacquesm 16y ago
You are 100% right but that's not a popular view around here. All it takes is two guys and two laptops. I think in part that is because with YCs backing the two guys with laptops actually stand a chance of success. If the two guys with laptops had to make it 'on their own' it would turn out to be a lot harder.
DannoHung 16y ago
So you want to read about companies with no competitive advantages anywhere in the organization? Maybe some big firm that uses its marketshare to enforce a significant amount of revenue as opposed to better handling of operations, marketing, R&D, customer support, sales, etc?

tlammens 16y ago

Wave as is may be dead, the technology will live on in other google products. Introducing it as a big bang was maybe not the best way, too much change at a time. But gradually it will emerge in another form.

motters 16y ago

This seems pretty much like a straw man argument. The notion that Facebook concentrates upon user experience, given all the privacy wrangling and complaints about the user interface being needlessly changed or being too convoluted, seems to be not very well founded. Fundamentally the concept of Wave seemed good, and I think there is (or will be in future) a demand for something better than email which consolidates email, instant messaging, microblogging and some project/time management features into a single interface. I think what happened with Wave was not that they concentrated too much upon the engineering but precisely the opposite. If they had spent more time engineering a slick, fast system which scales to large multi-user conversations without crashing or grinding to a halt and integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition then there would have been a much bigger chance of Wave becoming a success.

docgnome 16y ago
"...integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition..." Nail on the head. That is exactly why I didn't use wave more than a handful of times even though I rather like it. If I'm the only person who uses the email when everyone else uses snail mail, it's not really very useful.

dmitri1981 16y ago

I've read similar arguments here being leveled at Microsoft. Given their strong culture and hiring practices they ended up hiring people who were strong engineers. At the same time that resulted in the company developing blind spots in areas where a different approach would have been more beneficial. I guess the risk is that when you end up phenomenally successful using a particular method, it becomes very difficult to go against that ingrained culture and try doing things a different way. Best example of a company combating that issue, in my opinion, is the IBM PC, where they gave Don Estridge free reign to carry out the project outside the normal operating procedures of the company which the management realised would have destroyed any chances of the project becoming a success.

waqf 16y ago
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/ http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/ It's not a metaphor about monarchs, but about horses ... but I guess nobody knows what those are anymore.

moultano 16y ago

This post is pretty much information-free. This seems to be his only criticism of the product, and it isn't even correct: >It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email. This was explicitly thought about. The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting. The perceived problem is that most of the time people spend chatting is waiting for the other person to finish typing. No one quite knew what sort of social effects this would have, but by taking a poll they would have just built a "faster horse."

Elepsis 16y ago
Really? ICQ built character by character typing all the way back in the late 90s, and users back then stumbled across basically all of the same landmines Google Wave exposed. The issue is that the problem Google's engineers perceived simply did not exist. The latency of waiting 30 seconds for a person to finish forming their thought into something coherent just isn't something worth overcoming.
elblanco 16y ago
Every single person I know who used Wave thought the character-by-character thing was terrible and wanted it turned off. A few of them actually stopped using it as soon as they realized it did this since they didn't want to broadcast half-formed thoughts to the world.
- moultano 16y ago
  I'm not saying it was the right decision, but the thesis that they didn't think about it because they're engineers just isn't true.
- benno 16y ago
  Broadcasting half-formed thoughts can be desirable; we do it everyday when talking face-to-face.

10ren 16y ago

The second section discusses SOAP/REST and XML/JSON, saying that XML Schema attempted to solve two problems (document formats + object wire format), but it predictably became too complex. He claims that we now use REST (not SOAP) and JSON (not XML), so the "impedance mismatch" problem is now solved. Is this true? JSON is used mainly where there is Javascript (ie. client side webpages - though that is becoming more and more inclusive these days... almost everything is a webapp (exceptions?)) - but it's schemaless (or typeless). While this is popular (eg key-value NoSQL stores, and dynamic typing in Ruby, Python, Perl), it's not right for everything. If you did want typed data, you'd probably just use XML Schema, since everything is already there. I ask because of a startup idea based on XML Schema. It could survive XML Schema going away, but I'm not so sure about the apparent long-term trend away from schemas/types altogether. With fast-enough computers to nullify the speed advantage of static types, will the remaining advantage of type-safety be valuable enough on its own - What is the evidence for and against? Even databases are going schemaless (it seems).

arebop 16y ago
If I wanted typed data, I would be more inclined to use RelaxNG than XML Schema. In some situations, XML might not be so advantageous. JSON is quite convenient for JavaScript applications. Protocol Buffers have an efficient wire representation. I think his point of JSON vs. XML is that JSON is simpler because it is designed specifically for representing structured data exchanged among JavaScript programs. Sure, it can be used from other languages and read by humans, but the design goal was much more narrowly circumscribed than the design goals of SGML, XML, and XML-Schema. The argument about SOAP vs. REST is not as well-developed, but I think he's saying that SOAP was doomed by its attempt to stretch XML to serve one too many masters. Personally though I see REST as a set of principles more than an RPC standard. It seems to me that REST's success is due both to the evolutionary manner in which it developed, and the relatively simple architectural form it takes compared to the SOAP/WS-* protocol specifications.

sandipagr 16y ago

the reason wave failed was cause it was not integrated with gmail! It's that simple. All the rest of the arguments are just killing the dead animal

thisorthat 16y ago

Google Wave could have been great if it was not designed by engineers.It amazes me that such a giant company does not put more effort into design and usability.

ewanmcteagle 16y ago

Google Wave... whatever. What annoys me is that we lost etherpad for this. That was a really effective product.

drawkbox 16y ago

Because a marketing/business driven product has never failed before... Also wasn't this part of the newer Google that looked better and was primarily more product/marketing/suits driven like Buzz? If it was engineering culture that killed Wave, engineers are ok with failing to make something better or to analyze it. Later perfecting it for a solid product/system. I believe the product failed in the way they released it and that Google may have found the limit for how connected people want to be. Cool as it was, Wave seemed exhausting and we don't need to see people type each letter. Waves happen naturally on the web, twitter, facebook etc. Google hurried the response to that. I do believe many components will be reused on Google.me. Also I wonder if they have any issue with GWT now that they are being sued for Java licensing on Android.

aufreak3 16y ago

Frankly, this is just punditry. Nothing wrong with trying something and failing at it and moving on cutting your losses short. I give google the credit for choosing to fail this way instead of failing with, say, marketing efforts.

ddelony 16y ago

Google's non-search products are really just research projects.

nanairo 16y ago
Why? You offered a non-obvious assessment without any evidence or argumentation. Personally I think you are completely wrong. Google is in the business of targeted ads. For that they need infos about the user. Everything else is just a trap to get you to tell them a bit about yourself. Helping you in your searches, is as important as knowing what and who you email. Facebook, who is also entering the same market, is giving them food for thought exactly because of that. Facebook offers almost no search, but they get your infos from other means. From Google's perspective the end result is similar.
- ddelony 16y ago
  I'm not knocking Google in any way. It's just that, as the article says, Google seems to be developing their new products because thee engineers think they're cool, regardless of whether they're actually commercial. In this way, Google is the Bell Labs of the 21st century.
  - drawkbox 16y ago
    Lots of good stuff came out of Bell Labs, modern software being one of them, C++ another. Lots of things you are looking at right now while at your computer were influenced by Bell Labs.
    - ddelony 16y ago
      I have enormous respect for Bell Labs, at least until they decided to kill non telecommunications projects.

resdirector 16y ago

When I read that they'd made their Google Wave API before they had user-adoption, I thought gee, they've got their priorities wrong.

tybris 16y ago

Did Google Wave fail? I thought it just started? Google mainly suffers from people (including those at Google) thinking that everything they do will be big from day 1. Even though that never happened to any of their other products.

nanairo 16y ago
You think? I thought exactly the opposite. The problem of Google to me seems to be that they release something they think it's good enough and then just leave it there hoping that time will prove them right. Then one day they wake up and see there has not been any adoption, and kill it. When Google releases something they are hardly all behind it, and seem to forget about it in a week.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  In that case, they are suffering from the same internal-politics fratricide that Microsoft has been long suffering from. I'm wondering if Google is at the peak of their innovation curve?

stcredzero 16y ago

It's not only Wave!