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How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave

336 points by eadmund 9y ago

JepZ 9y ago
Actually, I still like the idea of Wave, but to be honest, I didn't like the idea of using a google server and as far as I remember, the self hosted servers were available when Wave was abandoned by Google already and they were in a miserable condition (buggy GUI, limited features). So apart from these obvious problems I think their biggest mistake was the try to replace email instead of evolving email to wave.
elvinyung 9y ago
Not a shill: I think Notion [1] gets close to being a spiritual successor to Wave (much more so than Slack). It's essentially a multimedia collaboration tool and it's really nice. It's not quite a wiki, and distinctly more freeform than a document editor, but still way more powerful than just a plaintext editor or a chat app. My social group has begun to use it it for a pretty wide variety of things, ranging from rough notes to blog posts to draft documents. [1] https://www.notion.so https://www.notion.so
- Alex3917 9y ago
  How is the data export? I like the idea, but the fact that it seems to only export data into Markdown or HTML rather than something more structured, like XML or JSON, makes me nervous.
  - kjksf 9y ago
    They are working on an API (https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/963577523320717312 https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/963577523320717312)
jasonlotito 9y ago
I've said it in the past, and I'll say it again, Google Wave was a great idea that was pitched by Google in a bad way. All it's promise was torpedoed because of the way Google marketed it. There is nothing out there that solves the problems Wave solved, and because of that, communication and collaboration is still stuck in the Stone Age of the internet. Slack and Google Docs is the best we have, and they don't do anything that couldn't be done decades ago.
- jrcii 9y ago
  It was a great idea when I pitched the exact design to Vint Cerf five months before Google came out with it.
- marssaxman 9y ago
  Bad marketing seems plausible, because I never had any idea what problems it was meant to solve; it always seemed like someone had dreamed up the fancy architecture first and tried to justify it with use cases later.
sigsergv 9y ago
The spirit of failure of Google Wave was very similar to Google Glass failure. They were so badly presented, in so much wrong ways. The idea behind Wave is extremely great but why, oh god, WHY it was presented as a consumer (and not business/corp) product?!
- Pxtl 9y ago
  This. Everytime I'm thrashig out a design with other developers on Skype I wish we were using something mixing wiki and chat.
  - smt88 9y ago
    Google Docs has chat on the side and version history, along with live editing. What is it missing that you'd want?
    - qznc 9y ago
      It does lack connections between documents like a wiki. While you can do hyperlinks, it does not feel connected. Also, can you structure documents into find hierarchy or tagging system? Finally, no self hosting.
      - tajen 9y ago
        Better browsing across Google Docs documents would make it the killer software. - It probably requires a left sidebar with a tree of the project’s documents, - And perhaps a notion of document hierarchy, child pages or something to better browse. Aside from those, which aren’t technology challenging, it would make my startup switch to GApps.
      - smt88 9y ago
        > While you can do hyperlinks, it does not feel connected. Not sure what "feel connected" means. In both systems, you click a link and it takes you to the document in question. The only difference is that wiki links are shorter... > Also, can you structure documents into find hierarchy or tagging system? The hierarchy is just the file system, which only allows files to be in a single directory at a time. > Finally, no self hosting. OwnCloud with certain extensions probably does everything you want, e.g. https://owncloud.com/collabora/collaborative-editing/ https://owncloud.com/collabora/collaborative-editing/
sidcool 9y ago
I saw the live presentation of Google wave at Google IO in 2009. I was in awe of the technology & wanted my hands on it as soon as possible. The product vision was amazing and long term. But the product was just way ahead of its time. Apart from the performance issues and clunky UX, I feel the product overall was very cool. I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave.
- tehlike 9y ago
  I agree. I liked it back in the day, and the fact that you could attach people to subtrees of a conversation was rather cool. IT also fixes infinitely-deep email chain problem very well.
  - mavhc 9y ago
    It reminded me of usenet in that respect, easy to ignore subtrees you don't care about. What surprised me was Wave is obviously best for business, where email chains CC'd to a load of people who don't care are the norm, yet they killed it only months after enabling it for Google Apps
- wodenokoto 9y ago
  A group of friends excitedly signed up for wave and never found out how it was better at anything than a Google doc and it's built in chat. We spend a lot of time just figuring out what we wanted to communicate about inside wave and settled on planning a trip abroad, and eventually migrated to docs.
- mercer 9y ago
  Google Wave had quite an effect on how I react to 'cool, new tech things'. I was very excited about it and convinced friends to try it out, but then in practice it just didn't 'click'. Ever since I've been paying a lot more attention to the somewhat indefinable 'feel' of a tool. Trello, for example, felt right despite its relative simplicity (or because of it?), so I felt like it had a bigger chance of working out. If I had to define it, I guess it would be something in the direction of what someone in an early React presentation described as the 'pit of success'. Using the tool feels like it was optimized for how 'you' use it, and I suppose if everyone feels that way, it's got a chance of succeeding. tl;dr: 'apart from the clunky UX' is probably a bad sign.
voiper1 9y ago
>Assuming you could stand Wave’s interface, it’d still be useless unless the people you wanted to communicate and collaborate with were also using it. Wave was intended to completely replace existing systems like email and chat, so it had no provisions for interoperating with those systems. To succeed, Wave required a revolution, a critical mass of people switching to the new way and dragging the rest of the world with them—and those haven’t worked out very often. Back in the day, when I realized there was no backward-interop with email, I was afraid it wasn't going to go very far... network effect is hard to tame.
- bsimpson 9y ago
  I still can't believe they tried to build hype around a tool that was useless without a network effect, and then rationed off invitations to actually use it. The PM couldn't have possibly been surprised when it didn't catch on.
  - mnx 9y ago
    I think they saw it as an effective method for building hype. I mean, gmail used to work on invites too.
    - bsimpson 9y ago
      Yeah, but Gmail could trade messages with all the email accounts everyone already had; there was no bootstrapping a social platform problem.
cma 9y ago
I wonder if heavy use of XML stunted it.
ryukafalz 9y ago
>They released sample implementations under open source licenses, encouraged others to run their own Wave servers independent of Google infrastructure, and defined a federation protocol (on top of Jabber/XMPP) so that people on different servers could still talk with each other. With the caveat that this was of course several years ago, I seem to recall the reference implementation missing several major features. Private replies were notably absent. It was all properly specced out, but the only available server software was incomplete - at least, it was when I tried running it.
drumhead 9y ago
90 minute help video, that was enough to put me off.
m12k 9y ago
On the flipside, there's also the point that while it's cool that Operational Transform allows for a decentralized service without a central server, it also makes the requirements to use and extend the algorithm (e.g. with new editing commands for new types of media) needlessly complex if you're going to be running it with a central server anyway. I can see why it might not be seen as a solid business strategy at Google to launch a service with an increased development and maintenance burden just so others can EEE it. This also reminds me of the present day where blockchains are popping up in tons of places where a central server would solve the task just fine. Edit: Could any of the people downvoting me please state their position? I didn't think my comment was disrespectful or off topic, so I'm wondering what their problem with it is?
erikrothoff 9y ago
I think the killer idea with Google Wave was real-time collaboration on anything. It was just way too broad. We used it for project planning like many others here. Now I don't think there is anything a shared Google Doc or Google Sheet doesn't solve more intuitively, with more specialised tools for the task. I love the idea described in the article of real-time collaborated _things_, as opposed to a timeline of ideas from a team. Specially for things like Github Issues or other bug management. The goal would be a shared living document, not a list of discussions. Really cool!
realworldview 9y ago
Glittering, but definitely not gold. We used it for 15 minutes, ended up discussed how bad it was then rolled our eye in fake surprise when it was quickly dropped. Subsewuent discussions were about how it embodied the nee software generations. “Let’s do it because we can do it!” Google Wave? No, Google Edsel, Mk1.
mozumder 9y ago
Pretty sure I was one of the few people that used Wave on an actual collaborative project of dozens of people. It was great, way ahead of its time. I thought it was more useful than Slack is right now. The only real complaint I had with it was it's slightly slow user interface. With today's tech it would own.
factorialboy 9y ago
Google Ware failed as a product but its underlying technology was successfully absorbed into Google Docs, Slides, Spreadsheets etc.
rwallace 9y ago
Wave was cool technology with interesting ideas, but there is no substitute for getting the user interface right, and unfortunately they didn't. It's been a long time and there might be others I'm forgetting, but there were two important design errors: 1. Email lets you type an entire message before sending; IRC at least lets you type a whole paragraph, which is enough. Wave didn't let you type more than one character before sending. 2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order, but unfortunately they provided the latter instead of the former, whereas you actually need both. (Gmail provides both: new messages and threads. Git provides both: view changes, and view current code. Google Docs provides both. Either view alone does not suffice.) I would by all means encourage someone to take another shot at building something like Wave, with those problems fixed.
- SquareWheel 9y ago
  Regarding #1, wasn't there an option to not preview your message? I remember it being just under the input form.
  - rwallace 9y ago
    I remember looking for such a thing and not finding it. Maybe it was added later? I tried an early version of Wave, briefly. If it was indeed added later, this is an example of something Joel Spolsky cautioned against: don't do a huge marketing blitz for version 1.0 of your product. Aim for user count to increase in step with product maturity. Though admittedly this might be hard to avoid with a product that has strong network effects.
- sgift 9y ago
  > 2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order, Oh god, please don't, at least not for chat/irc/whatever-you-call-it. I've seen so many attempts to try to somehow add another layer of order on top of chronological order. All the threads and whatever features and it is always a "what the heck is that, where are my messages, why did they get rearranged" disaster.
digi_owl 9y ago
Not sure if anything really can replace email. After all it is a store-and-forward transmission system with arbitrary length text and inline attachment of binary data. all this makes individual emails self contained. Various proposed replacements are more focused on the "conversation" it seems.
- sova 9y ago
  and yet here we are, not discussing this by e-mail.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
nkkollaw 9y ago
I wonder why people but so much effort trying to replace things that work perfectly and no one wants replaced. Email, door locks, etc. work well as it, it's a non-problem. How about banks? I live in Poland and used to exchange Euros into Zloty at 3.97 with a 5% commission through my bank. Now I use Transferwise, and they give me a rate of 4.17 with a neglegible fee (a few cents). Now, that's an innovation that I welcome!
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  Old candy bar phones worked perfectly. Why every invent full screen glass phones. I don't have a problem trying to reinvent email. I do have an issue if they use market power to damage an existing technology that works well and openly across platforms.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    They didn't. You couldn't change the UI.
    - cdancette 9y ago
      This makes no sense for me. Email has plenty of issues too, you can't just take any new features the smartphones have and call it a default of the old phones. Email is "perfect" as long as nothing better replaces it, then it will no longer be perfect? A few issues of email I can think of : no guarantee your email will arrive, and no real acknowledgement it did. Also, Mailing lists are clunky for users (I still receive regularly emails with 500 recipients, where a mailing list would be far more appropriate). I also think of attachments, which are very limited in size with a lot of providers. So email is far from perfect, it's just that nothing better has arrived yet.
    - keithpeter 9y ago
      Candy bar phones worked as phones People decided that they liked portable computers far more after a brave company introduced a radical presentation of one.
- 9y ago
sam_goody 9y ago
Careful what you wish for, you may get it... Mail AMP is a Google controlled superset of email. It is a given by many that chat is the ultimate social glue, and G already has their own chat protocol. In the interest of keeping people engaged, and keeping them walled in, I kind figured the long play of Google mail is to slowly morph all email into (a partially email compatible) Wave.
some1else 9y ago
We once collaborated on a design document in Wave, before discovering that printing wasn't really supported by the app. I was very impressed and excited by Wave, but we all just needed better Google Docs.
peoplewindow 9y ago
The initial implementation was a JavaScript-heavy web application in an era when people weren’t used to that. Browsers weren’t optimized to run so much code and so the user experience was terrible There seems to be some historical revisionism here. Perhaps you could have said that about Gmail but no, when Wave came out people were very much used to crappy web apps. Wave suffered because it tried to make browsers do too much but that's been a common pathology for the entire history of the web, it was nothing to do with users not being "used to it". If they'd written Wave as a desktop app it would have had more of a chance. I remember using it and the performance was awful, but not for any fundamental reason. Browsers just suck as app platforms.
mft_ 9y ago
I remember being very excited by Wave when it was released - and while I didn't use it heavily, and didn't use it with many concurrent users on a document, I never particularly suffered from the usability issues others have described. For me, though, it failed for two reasons: * Wave was a solution in search of a problem, a need. It was fantastic as a tech demo --back when it was released, it was magical-- but it never seemed to fill a niche? It wasn't fully-fledged-enough to be a word processor, it wasn't really for communication, etc. I liked the description of other posters using it for gradually developing ideas --almost like a virtual pinboard-- but my guess is that very few teams work like this, and especially few outside of the bleeding edge tech space. * Change is hard without a compelling reason. For example, I work in a (non-IT) organisation which offers people a choice of (legacy) MS Office + Sharepoint, vs. (the upstart) Google Docs. To me, Google Docs is far better for all a fraction of our work - it's faster, smoother, easier to share, and has (thanks to Wave!) collaborative editing... yet the proportion of users with the mindset to adopt it voluntarily I'd put at <5%, and probably even lower. And Wave offered a far less rounded, less compelling, less approachable product than Docs.
- wpietri 9y ago
  This definitely matches my understanding. It seemed like a glorified demo, something developed in a bubble. Which is fine if you want to make a tech demo. But it's a terrible way to make a product that people actually adopt. I have to suspect that nobody on the team had ever read Crossing the Chasm; if they did, they would have know that technophiles are a very small percentage of the market. If we want broad adoption, we a) have to solve an important problem for early adopters, and then b) broaden features and approachability enough that the majority of users will switch. As the article points out, this is worse for network-effect products. Maybe interoperability would have helped. (And maybe not; Slack didn't bother with much of that.) But I don't think it was the primary mistake they made.
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  We use google docs in school, the students do multi-player documents all the time. Being in the same room removes almost all of the friction. Want a team member to research part of the topic and while you write the intro? Super easy. I'm not sure how to get that level of communication when the team is spread across multiple locations... webcams maybe
Arathorn 9y ago
> Would somebody please try again but with less hubris this time? A lot of Matrix.org is inspired by what Wave could have been - although we are running late with threading (but some work is happening currently there). From our perspective, one of the biggest gaps was the lack of bridging in Wave to other existing comms interfaces (eg email) - as well as the quirky UX.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vbezhenar 9y ago
I never really understood all the buzz about it. I used it few times with friends to plan holidays, it was surely useful, but it looked like a very tiny product, not something important and huge. Something that bored developer could build on holidays. I guess, I didn't discover something important.
gkya 9y ago
The only thing that can replace e-mail is, e-mail. We need a means for communications that are not instant, and allow for long-form, off-line, complex interactions, based on decentralised infrastructure. That'll continue to exist in some form along with all the other means we have, and that's a nice thing.
pluma 9y ago
I think the most important part is this: > * Assuming you could stand Wave’s interface, it’d still be useless unless the people you wanted to communicate and collaborate with were also using it. Wave was intended to completely replace existing systems like email and chat, so it had no provisions for interoperating with those systems. To succeed, Wave required a revolution, a critical mass of people switching to the new way and dragging the rest of the world with them—and those haven’t worked out very often. > * Making the revolution even more unlikely, initially Google offered Wave accounts by invitation only, so the people you wanted to talk with probably couldn’t even get an account. I was excited about Google Wave at the time but first had to wait what felt like ages for an invite and then barely anyone I knew was on it and I quickly ran out of invites myself (because not everyone you send an invite will be as excited to use it as you are). To replace e-mail it would have had to at least provide some kind of gateway between wave and e-mail to ease the transition -- or it would have had to integrate more closely with other tools and applications to "trick" people into adopting it (like how Google Talk integrated with GMail). The "openness" was neat but didn't help them gain any traction because there was no incentive to actually build and run your own server because there were no users.
mark_l_watson 9y ago
Brilliant article. Loved the idea that new technologies must provide bridges for older technology that people may need to use. I am one of the four people who really liked Google Wave. I wrote a plug-in for it, and when Wave was shut down I stood up an instance of Apache Wave for friends and family. Basically no one wanted to use it except to play with it for a few minutes. I want to check out the author’s C to Rust translator that he mentioned at the end of the article.
threefour 9y ago
I wrote a complete case study on Google Wave here: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Fail-Learning-Experience/dp/1933820179 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Fail-Learning-Experience/dp/19...
MichelChouinard 9y ago
Thanks for this article. Make me wonder... What happen to projects that apache incubator retire like this one?
tomrod 9y ago
I liked Google Wave.
rorygibson 9y ago
Replacing other forms of communication is always a non-starter; every org builds up data legacy in the various tools they've tried out over the years. (Shameless plug: that's why I built CTX - https://getctx.io https://getctx.io - a SaaS cloud search tool that indexes your data in things like email, Slack, Trello, GitHub, JIRA and Google Drive)
puzzle 9y ago
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the scrollbars yet. The original post mentions the bespoke UI, but only faults it for using MDI. The non-native scrollbars were smart and nifty, but, at the end of the day, they were jarring to use. I don't remember many single UI features that ever made me alternate so frequently between "neat!" and "WTH?!?". And I've seen lots of interfaces on many platforms. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...
- ken 9y ago
  I thought I'd heard that the scrollbars were custom because it did some fancy infinite-scrolling thing that wasn't really compatible with normal scrollbars. If it's true they were custom to make them work well "on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area", that's even worse. They know I'm on a desktop computer with a big screen, and they're delivering a netbook-optimized user experience.
qaq 9y ago
Well I think they missed the mark Wave could have being MS Teams, hipchat, slack alternative with a bit of tweaking :)
bane 9y ago
When Wave came out I worked at a small software company that was pretty distributed all over the country. Wave came as close as anything ever has for being the perfect collaboration tool for us. The key was taking the set of tools that Wave provided and putting them together to support your desired outcome. Here's something I wrote about it back then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533023 Sadly, since Google killed it, I've never been able to get other teams to pick up the open sourced versions and now everybody just wants to use <insert latest startup collab tool>. It definitely had a tremendous number of problems in execution, but I never really got why Google killed it so fast. It seems that a reboot and rethink of some core metaphors would have tightened it up into the new paradigm it needed to become.
wnevets 9y ago
IMHO wave's biggest problem was the close beta hype.
tammer 9y ago
I think these lessons are so profound that they actually extend beyond technology to most business or social concepts.
syednashikaman 9y ago
test comment
nishlashakya 9y ago
cool

336 points by eadmund 9y ago

JepZ 9y ago

Actually, I still like the idea of Wave, but to be honest, I didn't like the idea of using a google server and as far as I remember, the self hosted servers were available when Wave was abandoned by Google already and they were in a miserable condition (buggy GUI, limited features). So apart from these obvious problems I think their biggest mistake was the try to replace email instead of evolving email to wave.

elvinyung 9y ago

Not a shill: I think Notion [1] gets close to being a spiritual successor to Wave (much more so than Slack). It's essentially a multimedia collaboration tool and it's really nice. It's not quite a wiki, and distinctly more freeform than a document editor, but still way more powerful than just a plaintext editor or a chat app. My social group has begun to use it it for a pretty wide variety of things, ranging from rough notes to blog posts to draft documents. [1] https://www.notion.so https://www.notion.so

Alex3917 9y ago
How is the data export? I like the idea, but the fact that it seems to only export data into Markdown or HTML rather than something more structured, like XML or JSON, makes me nervous.
- kjksf 9y ago
  They are working on an API (https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/963577523320717312 https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/963577523320717312)

jasonlotito 9y ago

I've said it in the past, and I'll say it again, Google Wave was a great idea that was pitched by Google in a bad way. All it's promise was torpedoed because of the way Google marketed it. There is nothing out there that solves the problems Wave solved, and because of that, communication and collaboration is still stuck in the Stone Age of the internet. Slack and Google Docs is the best we have, and they don't do anything that couldn't be done decades ago.

jrcii 9y ago
It was a great idea when I pitched the exact design to Vint Cerf five months before Google came out with it.
marssaxman 9y ago
Bad marketing seems plausible, because I never had any idea what problems it was meant to solve; it always seemed like someone had dreamed up the fancy architecture first and tried to justify it with use cases later.

sigsergv 9y ago

The spirit of failure of Google Wave was very similar to Google Glass failure. They were so badly presented, in so much wrong ways. The idea behind Wave is extremely great but why, oh god, WHY it was presented as a consumer (and not business/corp) product?!

Pxtl 9y ago
This. Everytime I'm thrashig out a design with other developers on Skype I wish we were using something mixing wiki and chat.
- smt88 9y ago
  Google Docs has chat on the side and version history, along with live editing. What is it missing that you'd want?
  - qznc 9y ago
    It does lack connections between documents like a wiki. While you can do hyperlinks, it does not feel connected. Also, can you structure documents into find hierarchy or tagging system? Finally, no self hosting.
    - tajen 9y ago
      Better browsing across Google Docs documents would make it the killer software. - It probably requires a left sidebar with a tree of the project’s documents, - And perhaps a notion of document hierarchy, child pages or something to better browse. Aside from those, which aren’t technology challenging, it would make my startup switch to GApps.
    - smt88 9y ago
      > While you can do hyperlinks, it does not feel connected. Not sure what "feel connected" means. In both systems, you click a link and it takes you to the document in question. The only difference is that wiki links are shorter... > Also, can you structure documents into find hierarchy or tagging system? The hierarchy is just the file system, which only allows files to be in a single directory at a time. > Finally, no self hosting. OwnCloud with certain extensions probably does everything you want, e.g. https://owncloud.com/collabora/collaborative-editing/ https://owncloud.com/collabora/collaborative-editing/

sidcool 9y ago

I saw the live presentation of Google wave at Google IO in 2009. I was in awe of the technology & wanted my hands on it as soon as possible. The product vision was amazing and long term. But the product was just way ahead of its time. Apart from the performance issues and clunky UX, I feel the product overall was very cool. I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave.

tehlike 9y ago
I agree. I liked it back in the day, and the fact that you could attach people to subtrees of a conversation was rather cool. IT also fixes infinitely-deep email chain problem very well.
- mavhc 9y ago
  It reminded me of usenet in that respect, easy to ignore subtrees you don't care about. What surprised me was Wave is obviously best for business, where email chains CC'd to a load of people who don't care are the norm, yet they killed it only months after enabling it for Google Apps
wodenokoto 9y ago
A group of friends excitedly signed up for wave and never found out how it was better at anything than a Google doc and it's built in chat. We spend a lot of time just figuring out what we wanted to communicate about inside wave and settled on planning a trip abroad, and eventually migrated to docs.
mercer 9y ago
Google Wave had quite an effect on how I react to 'cool, new tech things'. I was very excited about it and convinced friends to try it out, but then in practice it just didn't 'click'. Ever since I've been paying a lot more attention to the somewhat indefinable 'feel' of a tool. Trello, for example, felt right despite its relative simplicity (or because of it?), so I felt like it had a bigger chance of working out. If I had to define it, I guess it would be something in the direction of what someone in an early React presentation described as the 'pit of success'. Using the tool feels like it was optimized for how 'you' use it, and I suppose if everyone feels that way, it's got a chance of succeeding. tl;dr: 'apart from the clunky UX' is probably a bad sign.

voiper1 9y ago

>Assuming you could stand Wave’s interface, it’d still be useless unless the people you wanted to communicate and collaborate with were also using it. Wave was intended to completely replace existing systems like email and chat, so it had no provisions for interoperating with those systems. To succeed, Wave required a revolution, a critical mass of people switching to the new way and dragging the rest of the world with them—and those haven’t worked out very often. Back in the day, when I realized there was no backward-interop with email, I was afraid it wasn't going to go very far... network effect is hard to tame.

bsimpson 9y ago
I still can't believe they tried to build hype around a tool that was useless without a network effect, and then rationed off invitations to actually use it. The PM couldn't have possibly been surprised when it didn't catch on.
- mnx 9y ago
  I think they saw it as an effective method for building hype. I mean, gmail used to work on invites too.
  - bsimpson 9y ago
    Yeah, but Gmail could trade messages with all the email accounts everyone already had; there was no bootstrapping a social platform problem.

cma 9y ago

I wonder if heavy use of XML stunted it.

ryukafalz 9y ago

>They released sample implementations under open source licenses, encouraged others to run their own Wave servers independent of Google infrastructure, and defined a federation protocol (on top of Jabber/XMPP) so that people on different servers could still talk with each other. With the caveat that this was of course several years ago, I seem to recall the reference implementation missing several major features. Private replies were notably absent. It was all properly specced out, but the only available server software was incomplete - at least, it was when I tried running it.

drumhead 9y ago

90 minute help video, that was enough to put me off.

m12k 9y ago

On the flipside, there's also the point that while it's cool that Operational Transform allows for a decentralized service without a central server, it also makes the requirements to use and extend the algorithm (e.g. with new editing commands for new types of media) needlessly complex if you're going to be running it with a central server anyway. I can see why it might not be seen as a solid business strategy at Google to launch a service with an increased development and maintenance burden just so others can EEE it. This also reminds me of the present day where blockchains are popping up in tons of places where a central server would solve the task just fine. Edit: Could any of the people downvoting me please state their position? I didn't think my comment was disrespectful or off topic, so I'm wondering what their problem with it is?

erikrothoff 9y ago

I think the killer idea with Google Wave was real-time collaboration on anything. It was just way too broad. We used it for project planning like many others here. Now I don't think there is anything a shared Google Doc or Google Sheet doesn't solve more intuitively, with more specialised tools for the task. I love the idea described in the article of real-time collaborated _things_, as opposed to a timeline of ideas from a team. Specially for things like Github Issues or other bug management. The goal would be a shared living document, not a list of discussions. Really cool!

realworldview 9y ago

Glittering, but definitely not gold. We used it for 15 minutes, ended up discussed how bad it was then rolled our eye in fake surprise when it was quickly dropped. Subsewuent discussions were about how it embodied the nee software generations. “Let’s do it because we can do it!” Google Wave? No, Google Edsel, Mk1.

mozumder 9y ago

Pretty sure I was one of the few people that used Wave on an actual collaborative project of dozens of people. It was great, way ahead of its time. I thought it was more useful than Slack is right now. The only real complaint I had with it was it's slightly slow user interface. With today's tech it would own.

factorialboy 9y ago

Google Ware failed as a product but its underlying technology was successfully absorbed into Google Docs, Slides, Spreadsheets etc.

rwallace 9y ago

Wave was cool technology with interesting ideas, but there is no substitute for getting the user interface right, and unfortunately they didn't. It's been a long time and there might be others I'm forgetting, but there were two important design errors: 1. Email lets you type an entire message before sending; IRC at least lets you type a whole paragraph, which is enough. Wave didn't let you type more than one character before sending. 2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order, but unfortunately they provided the latter instead of the former, whereas you actually need both. (Gmail provides both: new messages and threads. Git provides both: view changes, and view current code. Google Docs provides both. Either view alone does not suffice.) I would by all means encourage someone to take another shot at building something like Wave, with those problems fixed.

SquareWheel 9y ago
Regarding #1, wasn't there an option to not preview your message? I remember it being just under the input form.
- rwallace 9y ago
  I remember looking for such a thing and not finding it. Maybe it was added later? I tried an early version of Wave, briefly. If it was indeed added later, this is an example of something Joel Spolsky cautioned against: don't do a huge marketing blitz for version 1.0 of your product. Aim for user count to increase in step with product maturity. Though admittedly this might be hard to avoid with a product that has strong network effects.
sgift 9y ago
> 2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order, Oh god, please don't, at least not for chat/irc/whatever-you-call-it. I've seen so many attempts to try to somehow add another layer of order on top of chronological order. All the threads and whatever features and it is always a "what the heck is that, where are my messages, why did they get rearranged" disaster.

digi_owl 9y ago

Not sure if anything really can replace email. After all it is a store-and-forward transmission system with arbitrary length text and inline attachment of binary data. all this makes individual emails self contained. Various proposed replacements are more focused on the "conversation" it seems.

sova 9y ago
and yet here we are, not discussing this by e-mail.
- deleted 9y ago
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nkkollaw 9y ago

I wonder why people but so much effort trying to replace things that work perfectly and no one wants replaced. Email, door locks, etc. work well as it, it's a non-problem. How about banks? I live in Poland and used to exchange Euros into Zloty at 3.97 with a 5% commission through my bank. Now I use Transferwise, and they give me a rate of 4.17 with a neglegible fee (a few cents). Now, that's an innovation that I welcome!

Gustomaximus 9y ago
Old candy bar phones worked perfectly. Why every invent full screen glass phones. I don't have a problem trying to reinvent email. I do have an issue if they use market power to damage an existing technology that works well and openly across platforms.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  They didn't. You couldn't change the UI.
  - cdancette 9y ago
    This makes no sense for me. Email has plenty of issues too, you can't just take any new features the smartphones have and call it a default of the old phones. Email is "perfect" as long as nothing better replaces it, then it will no longer be perfect? A few issues of email I can think of : no guarantee your email will arrive, and no real acknowledgement it did. Also, Mailing lists are clunky for users (I still receive regularly emails with 500 recipients, where a mailing list would be far more appropriate). I also think of attachments, which are very limited in size with a lot of providers. So email is far from perfect, it's just that nothing better has arrived yet.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    Candy bar phones worked as phones People decided that they liked portable computers far more after a brave company introduced a radical presentation of one.
9y ago

sam_goody 9y ago

Careful what you wish for, you may get it... Mail AMP is a Google controlled superset of email. It is a given by many that chat is the ultimate social glue, and G already has their own chat protocol. In the interest of keeping people engaged, and keeping them walled in, I kind figured the long play of Google mail is to slowly morph all email into (a partially email compatible) Wave.

some1else 9y ago

We once collaborated on a design document in Wave, before discovering that printing wasn't really supported by the app. I was very impressed and excited by Wave, but we all just needed better Google Docs.

peoplewindow 9y ago

The initial implementation was a JavaScript-heavy web application in an era when people weren’t used to that. Browsers weren’t optimized to run so much code and so the user experience was terrible There seems to be some historical revisionism here. Perhaps you could have said that about Gmail but no, when Wave came out people were very much used to crappy web apps. Wave suffered because it tried to make browsers do too much but that's been a common pathology for the entire history of the web, it was nothing to do with users not being "used to it". If they'd written Wave as a desktop app it would have had more of a chance. I remember using it and the performance was awful, but not for any fundamental reason. Browsers just suck as app platforms.

mft_ 9y ago

I remember being very excited by Wave when it was released - and while I didn't use it heavily, and didn't use it with many concurrent users on a document, I never particularly suffered from the usability issues others have described. For me, though, it failed for two reasons: * Wave was a solution in search of a problem, a need. It was fantastic as a tech demo --back when it was released, it was magical-- but it never seemed to fill a niche? It wasn't fully-fledged-enough to be a word processor, it wasn't really for communication, etc. I liked the description of other posters using it for gradually developing ideas --almost like a virtual pinboard-- but my guess is that very few teams work like this, and especially few outside of the bleeding edge tech space. * Change is hard without a compelling reason. For example, I work in a (non-IT) organisation which offers people a choice of (legacy) MS Office + Sharepoint, vs. (the upstart) Google Docs. To me, Google Docs is far better for all a fraction of our work - it's faster, smoother, easier to share, and has (thanks to Wave!) collaborative editing... yet the proportion of users with the mindset to adopt it voluntarily I'd put at <5%, and probably even lower. And Wave offered a far less rounded, less compelling, less approachable product than Docs.

wpietri 9y ago
This definitely matches my understanding. It seemed like a glorified demo, something developed in a bubble. Which is fine if you want to make a tech demo. But it's a terrible way to make a product that people actually adopt. I have to suspect that nobody on the team had ever read Crossing the Chasm; if they did, they would have know that technophiles are a very small percentage of the market. If we want broad adoption, we a) have to solve an important problem for early adopters, and then b) broaden features and approachability enough that the majority of users will switch. As the article points out, this is worse for network-effect products. Maybe interoperability would have helped. (And maybe not; Slack didn't bother with much of that.) But I don't think it was the primary mistake they made.
monk_e_boy 9y ago
We use google docs in school, the students do multi-player documents all the time. Being in the same room removes almost all of the friction. Want a team member to research part of the topic and while you write the intro? Super easy. I'm not sure how to get that level of communication when the team is spread across multiple locations... webcams maybe

Arathorn 9y ago

> Would somebody please try again but with less hubris this time? A lot of Matrix.org is inspired by what Wave could have been - although we are running late with threading (but some work is happening currently there). From our perspective, one of the biggest gaps was the lack of bridging in Wave to other existing comms interfaces (eg email) - as well as the quirky UX.

deleted 9y ago

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vbezhenar 9y ago

I never really understood all the buzz about it. I used it few times with friends to plan holidays, it was surely useful, but it looked like a very tiny product, not something important and huge. Something that bored developer could build on holidays. I guess, I didn't discover something important.

gkya 9y ago

The only thing that can replace e-mail is, e-mail. We need a means for communications that are not instant, and allow for long-form, off-line, complex interactions, based on decentralised infrastructure. That'll continue to exist in some form along with all the other means we have, and that's a nice thing.

pluma 9y ago

I think the most important part is this: > * Assuming you could stand Wave’s interface, it’d still be useless unless the people you wanted to communicate and collaborate with were also using it. Wave was intended to completely replace existing systems like email and chat, so it had no provisions for interoperating with those systems. To succeed, Wave required a revolution, a critical mass of people switching to the new way and dragging the rest of the world with them—and those haven’t worked out very often. > * Making the revolution even more unlikely, initially Google offered Wave accounts by invitation only, so the people you wanted to talk with probably couldn’t even get an account. I was excited about Google Wave at the time but first had to wait what felt like ages for an invite and then barely anyone I knew was on it and I quickly ran out of invites myself (because not everyone you send an invite will be as excited to use it as you are). To replace e-mail it would have had to at least provide some kind of gateway between wave and e-mail to ease the transition -- or it would have had to integrate more closely with other tools and applications to "trick" people into adopting it (like how Google Talk integrated with GMail). The "openness" was neat but didn't help them gain any traction because there was no incentive to actually build and run your own server because there were no users.

mark_l_watson 9y ago

Brilliant article. Loved the idea that new technologies must provide bridges for older technology that people may need to use. I am one of the four people who really liked Google Wave. I wrote a plug-in for it, and when Wave was shut down I stood up an instance of Apache Wave for friends and family. Basically no one wanted to use it except to play with it for a few minutes. I want to check out the author’s C to Rust translator that he mentioned at the end of the article.

threefour 9y ago

I wrote a complete case study on Google Wave here: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Fail-Learning-Experience/dp/1933820179 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Fail-Learning-Experience/dp/19...

MichelChouinard 9y ago

Thanks for this article. Make me wonder... What happen to projects that apache incubator retire like this one?

tomrod 9y ago

I liked Google Wave.

rorygibson 9y ago

Replacing other forms of communication is always a non-starter; every org builds up data legacy in the various tools they've tried out over the years. (Shameless plug: that's why I built CTX - https://getctx.io https://getctx.io - a SaaS cloud search tool that indexes your data in things like email, Slack, Trello, GitHub, JIRA and Google Drive)

puzzle 9y ago

I'm surprised nobody has brought up the scrollbars yet. The original post mentions the bespoke UI, but only faults it for using MDI. The non-native scrollbars were smart and nifty, but, at the end of the day, they were jarring to use. I don't remember many single UI features that ever made me alternate so frequently between "neat!" and "WTH?!?". And I've seen lots of interfaces on many platforms. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...

ken 9y ago
I thought I'd heard that the scrollbars were custom because it did some fancy infinite-scrolling thing that wasn't really compatible with normal scrollbars. If it's true they were custom to make them work well "on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area", that's even worse. They know I'm on a desktop computer with a big screen, and they're delivering a netbook-optimized user experience.

qaq 9y ago

Well I think they missed the mark Wave could have being MS Teams, hipchat, slack alternative with a bit of tweaking :)

bane 9y ago

When Wave came out I worked at a small software company that was pretty distributed all over the country. Wave came as close as anything ever has for being the perfect collaboration tool for us. The key was taking the set of tools that Wave provided and putting them together to support your desired outcome. Here's something I wrote about it back then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533023 Sadly, since Google killed it, I've never been able to get other teams to pick up the open sourced versions and now everybody just wants to use <insert latest startup collab tool>. It definitely had a tremendous number of problems in execution, but I never really got why Google killed it so fast. It seems that a reboot and rethink of some core metaphors would have tightened it up into the new paradigm it needed to become.

wnevets 9y ago

IMHO wave's biggest problem was the close beta hype.

tammer 9y ago

I think these lessons are so profound that they actually extend beyond technology to most business or social concepts.

syednashikaman 9y ago

test comment

nishlashakya 9y ago

cool