4 ms·
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 ne
by 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 agoThis 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 agoWe 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
- username223 9y ago"multi-player documents" I love this phrase! We did something similar way back in the day, only using Emacs and "M-x make-frame-on-display" instead. Just like in your case, it worked fine as long as everyone was in the same room. The one tricky part of "multi-player Emacs" was that only one person at a time could use the minibuffer.
- ghaff 9y agoIn general, I agree with you. There are a bunch of collaboration tools out there I just don't use much for some combination of others not using it and my just not finding it worth the mental load to fit into my workflow. Google Docs, on the other hand, pretty much everyone I work with has adopted it even though it was more or less voluntary. The application itself works well but the ability to have everyone comment and make suggestions in a single doc is a huge win. Admittedly, we didn't and don't use Sharepoint so the alternative was pretty much to mail documents around.
- barrkel 9y agoDocs also doesn't have copy and paste unless you're using Chrome, which is a real usability killer.
- OkGoDoIt 9y agoI mainly used it for brainstorming projects with remote friends. It was great for that! But I never figured out any other practical use. And Google docs or Microsoft onenote solve this almost as well nowadays, or at least well enough that I probably wouldn’t switch to Google wave if it just came out now