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To be fair, Google did a really bad job of explaining what Wave _actually was_ when it was launched, which was not helped by the naughties tech-tradition of bei
by fergie 7y ago
To be fair, Google did a really bad job of explaining what Wave _actually was_ when it was launched, which was not helped by the naughties tech-tradition of being "invitation only".
Had they simply said it was a cool chat application and given everybody access then it may well have caught on.
- piokoch 7y agoExactly. At that time I worked for a large educational institution that was introducing online learning (hot topic those days). When I read about Google Wave I said to myself - it looks great, we are ideal usecase for it. I asked for invitation explaining who we are (very big public edu institution), what we do, how much users we have (thousands), etc. But, obviously, my e-mail was ignored. Finally, after more than half a year I finally got the invitation, but Google Wave was already ridiculed by those invited earlier for its slowness and messy interface, we have chosen other software solution, so I haven't even checked what it can provide. A year or two later Google Wave was "opensourced" and "donated to the community", so I was very happy I didn't invest more time investigating it.
- johnmarcus 7y agoI don't think it was killed because it didn't catch on - almost everyones whom used it viewed it is positive and it was hardly even launched before they killed it. All of it's features are now in almost every chat application. Look how long they let the ghost town of Google+ linger on around for before sticking a fork in it. I think it was pure internal politics that killed wave and nothing else.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoYes. Wave is a perfect example of great idea, great product, poor - really really poor - roll out execution. To have a group of say six, five have Wave, one does not and can't get an invite...group can't use Wave. What wes Google thinking? Long to short, I bet there are plenty of great ideas/products in the startup graveyard waiting to be revived and re-executed. It's not the idea/product that failed but the marketing/growth.
- abtinf 7y agoI got an invite to wave, but no one else I knew was on it, so it had no value at all to me. It didn’t have that attribute that PG ascribed to reddit: the ability to be valuable with a small number of users. They also didn’t have explain how it was different, if at all, from similar chat systems of the past, like PowWow or ICQ chat. Those were both see-typing-in-real-time-systems that were, IMHO, not at all useful in business.
- chetanbhasin 7y agoPerhaps you joined wave before I did, but IIRC by the time I got an invitation each invited user had 5 inivitations to share among their friends/peers. So forming a group wouldn't have been a problem because you could invite your friends who could invite their friends.
- abtinf 7y agoThis sounds familiar. I don’t remember if my friends/colleagues didn’t want to join or what. So it might have been my fault. Still, the system seemed useless as single user.