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> I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave. I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had m

by zmb_ 9y ago

> I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave. I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.

duncanawoods 9y ago
Interesting, do you have a link? I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.
- zmb_ 9y ago
  Here it is: https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."
  - duncanawoods 9y ago
    Thanks. Sounds like management by metrics instead of vision.
    - throw_away 9y ago
      And if that's your metric, then why slow-roll the launch by making it invite only? If the answer is performance, like I suspect it may be, then why launch if you cannot achieve success by the sole metric you appear to be looking at?
    - wpietri 9y ago
      I don't think so. If you'd asked Wave's designers before the launch, their vision surely would have included increasing usage. It turns out few people cared about Wave. Schmidt's decision has been borne out by events. Did Wave take off when open sourced? No. Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Also no.
      - duncanawoods 9y ago
        I agree to a point but I want to see numbers leading to reasoning. If you identify why the numbers are bad and it is not something you can or want to turn around then sure, kill it. Killing off projects based only numbers alone is tyranny of the bean-counters. > Did Wave take off when open sourced? Eh, how many "dump and run" open-source projects take off? Bringing an opensource community to life is its own brutally hard problem.
        wpietri 9y ago
        The numbers were bad, Duncan, because not many people wanted to use it. Your theory that they are "killing off projects based only numbers" is something you appear to have made up. I think Google's real error was not killing it too soon, but allowing it to be developed in a bubble and then springing it on the world with a giant, "Ta da!" It let them ignore a lot of real-world problems and questions, investing heavily in untested design hypotheses. Once you get to the point of a huge global launch, you've baked in problems in a way that is very hard to fix.
      - useranme 9y ago
        > Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Slack. Trello.
        wpietri 9y ago
        Slack is basically a spiffed-up IRC. Trello is a virtual index card board. Neither is, "designed to merge key features of communications media such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking."
  - alecthomas 9y ago
    I know it's easy for me to say in hindsight, but I think that as the CEO Eric Schmidt's big failure with Wave wasn't "I should have cancelled it sooner" but "I should have encouraged a better, more focused product".
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      I don't know.. I'm trying to think of a product that was fundamentally broken in v1 that was eventually "fixed" by exec encouragement/buyin/investment and ended up succeeding. Maybe Internet Explorer. Yea, I suppose Microsoft is the master of this "v1=shit, v2=shit, v3=barely usable, v4=world dominating" approach.
      - whatusername 9y ago
        How about the iPhone? (No copy/paste, no apps, no 3G, etc) Apple usually mail the core experience with v1, but all the ancillary roles have to wait till v3 or v4.
- kentonv 9y ago
  > has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? Schmidt was CEO from 2001 to 2011. During that time period, Google basically invented all the infrastructure we take for granted in distributed systems today, popularized the concepts of JavaScript-heavy web applications and Software as a Service, created from scratch a new browser (Chrome) and a new operating system (Android) which promptly dominated the market, and became one of the top five largest companies in the world. I think he deserves some credit, yeah.
  - duncanawoods 9y ago
    He certainly has business achievements but I'm not sure how much these count as invention as I mean it. The type of invention I have in mind is where novelty is a significant obstacle i.e. it requires education and transformation in the expectations and behaviour of the audience not just solving technical problems. In this type of invention, you have to swim upstream against the numbers holding on to a vision to break through. - Chrome - competitive play - iterative improvements over competitors - Android - competitive play - purchased, playing catch-up to competitors - Infrastructure - internal services Basically, is he is more Xerox Copier division than Xerox Parc?
    - kentonv 9y ago
      Obviously Eric wasn't creating the inventions himself, but I would argue that he fostered innovation very effectively in the way he ran the company. Eric hired amazing people and put them into an environment where bottom-up innovation could happen, and then he stood back and let it happen. It was chaotic, but a lot of great stuff came out of it. OTOH, when Larry took over, things became much more top-down, with Larry trying to be Steve Jobs and tell the company what they should be building next -- most notably when it came to Google+. I left before Sundar took over so I don't know how he runs things, but it seems like Google these days is just sort of chugging along, building solid products but not doing anything revolutionary.
      - duncanawoods 9y ago
        You use the term innovation which I avoided because it typically only means "bring to market" instead of invention which I see as novel work to traverse a wilderness of unknowns. He views his mistake not as identifying a fault in the vision or the implementation but in not responding to numbers soon enough which I find telling. You can't lose sight of the shore to discover new worlds if you require positive numbers at every step. The Larry approach sounds more vision-led and its interesting how it looks when it fails. Its difficult to see beyond the survivorship bias and only see it as egotistical and ignorant failure.
tehlike 9y ago
Google wave pretty much provided infrastructure for Google docs and other realtime communication products. Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it. Making it even more ridiculous that they killed off Google Reader for it (or didn't bother to revive it afterwards) EDIT: Also, they already had Picasa Web Albums since 2006. I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.
  - flavor8 9y ago
    > I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality. The machine learning assisted search. For example, if I want to find photos of whiteboards that I took to record a meeting, I type in "whiteboard".
    - tehlike 9y ago
      Also automatic curated photos, reminders and so on. A mobile app that is very simple and easy to use.
      - euyyn 9y ago
        And automatic sharing suggestions based on the people that was at an event.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Especially with Flickr stagnating at the hands of Yahoo, Google more or less had the market for a high-quality photo sharing site to itself had it wanted it. That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.

by zmb_ 9y ago

duncanawoods 9y ago

Interesting, do you have a link? I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.

zmb_ 9y ago
Here it is: https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."
- duncanawoods 9y ago
  Thanks. Sounds like management by metrics instead of vision.
  - throw_away 9y ago
    And if that's your metric, then why slow-roll the launch by making it invite only? If the answer is performance, like I suspect it may be, then why launch if you cannot achieve success by the sole metric you appear to be looking at?
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I don't think so. If you'd asked Wave's designers before the launch, their vision surely would have included increasing usage. It turns out few people cared about Wave. Schmidt's decision has been borne out by events. Did Wave take off when open sourced? No. Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Also no.
    - duncanawoods 9y ago
      I agree to a point but I want to see numbers leading to reasoning. If you identify why the numbers are bad and it is not something you can or want to turn around then sure, kill it. Killing off projects based only numbers alone is tyranny of the bean-counters. > Did Wave take off when open sourced? Eh, how many "dump and run" open-source projects take off? Bringing an opensource community to life is its own brutally hard problem.
      - wpietri 9y ago
        The numbers were bad, Duncan, because not many people wanted to use it. Your theory that they are "killing off projects based only numbers" is something you appear to have made up. I think Google's real error was not killing it too soon, but allowing it to be developed in a bubble and then springing it on the world with a giant, "Ta da!" It let them ignore a lot of real-world problems and questions, investing heavily in untested design hypotheses. Once you get to the point of a huge global launch, you've baked in problems in a way that is very hard to fix.
    - useranme 9y ago
      > Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Slack. Trello.
      - wpietri 9y ago
        Slack is basically a spiffed-up IRC. Trello is a virtual index card board. Neither is, "designed to merge key features of communications media such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking."
- alecthomas 9y ago
  I know it's easy for me to say in hindsight, but I think that as the CEO Eric Schmidt's big failure with Wave wasn't "I should have cancelled it sooner" but "I should have encouraged a better, more focused product".
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    I don't know.. I'm trying to think of a product that was fundamentally broken in v1 that was eventually "fixed" by exec encouragement/buyin/investment and ended up succeeding. Maybe Internet Explorer. Yea, I suppose Microsoft is the master of this "v1=shit, v2=shit, v3=barely usable, v4=world dominating" approach.
    - whatusername 9y ago
      How about the iPhone? (No copy/paste, no apps, no 3G, etc) Apple usually mail the core experience with v1, but all the ancillary roles have to wait till v3 or v4.
kentonv 9y ago
> has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? Schmidt was CEO from 2001 to 2011. During that time period, Google basically invented all the infrastructure we take for granted in distributed systems today, popularized the concepts of JavaScript-heavy web applications and Software as a Service, created from scratch a new browser (Chrome) and a new operating system (Android) which promptly dominated the market, and became one of the top five largest companies in the world. I think he deserves some credit, yeah.
- duncanawoods 9y ago
  He certainly has business achievements but I'm not sure how much these count as invention as I mean it. The type of invention I have in mind is where novelty is a significant obstacle i.e. it requires education and transformation in the expectations and behaviour of the audience not just solving technical problems. In this type of invention, you have to swim upstream against the numbers holding on to a vision to break through. - Chrome - competitive play - iterative improvements over competitors - Android - competitive play - purchased, playing catch-up to competitors - Infrastructure - internal services Basically, is he is more Xerox Copier division than Xerox Parc?
  - kentonv 9y ago
    Obviously Eric wasn't creating the inventions himself, but I would argue that he fostered innovation very effectively in the way he ran the company. Eric hired amazing people and put them into an environment where bottom-up innovation could happen, and then he stood back and let it happen. It was chaotic, but a lot of great stuff came out of it. OTOH, when Larry took over, things became much more top-down, with Larry trying to be Steve Jobs and tell the company what they should be building next -- most notably when it came to Google+. I left before Sundar took over so I don't know how he runs things, but it seems like Google these days is just sort of chugging along, building solid products but not doing anything revolutionary.
    - duncanawoods 9y ago
      You use the term innovation which I avoided because it typically only means "bring to market" instead of invention which I see as novel work to traverse a wilderness of unknowns. He views his mistake not as identifying a fault in the vision or the implementation but in not responding to numbers soon enough which I find telling. You can't lose sight of the shore to discover new worlds if you require positive numbers at every step. The Larry approach sounds more vision-led and its interesting how it looks when it fails. Its difficult to see beyond the survivorship bias and only see it as egotistical and ignorant failure.

tehlike 9y ago

Google wave pretty much provided infrastructure for Google docs and other realtime communication products. Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.

vanderZwan 9y ago
> Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it. Making it even more ridiculous that they killed off Google Reader for it (or didn't bother to revive it afterwards) EDIT: Also, they already had Picasa Web Albums since 2006. I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.
- flavor8 9y ago
  > I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality. The machine learning assisted search. For example, if I want to find photos of whiteboards that I took to record a meeting, I type in "whiteboard".
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Also automatic curated photos, reminders and so on. A mobile app that is very simple and easy to use.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      And automatic sharing suggestions based on the people that was at an event.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Especially with Flickr stagnating at the hands of Yahoo, Google more or less had the market for a high-quality photo sharing site to itself had it wanted it. That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.