Tech & Biz

Google Wave to be Discontinued

by Jordan Yerman | August 4, 2010 at 02:52 pm

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Google Wave to Be Shut Down

Google Wave did not see the widespread user adoption that its creators and evangelists had hoped for. The web-wide geekgasm upon Wave's private beta launch failed to translate into regular users, and there was no clear target market for the tool.

As such, Google Wave will be discontinued. We can't deny the cool factor of Wave, but it did not effectively supplant existing IM technology.

So What Went Wrong with Google Wave?

The problem with Google Wave was not the technology itself, but the environment into which it was released: there was no clear and present problem for which Wave was the solution. During beta tests, users would not necessarily be connected to their real-life collaborators, so test cases would be stilted at best. That first day of end-user testing is the most important time in the product's life: it's when your new toy will either find love, hate or (worst of all) indifference.

In my case, I was unable to find anything that Wave could do which Skype could not already handle, and I was used to Skype already. Furthermore, there was no straightforward way to find out what I should be using it for.

So my enthusiasm for Wave died on the vine, and mine was clearly not an isolated experience.

So, is Google Wave a failure? Not exactly. As a product, yeah, it didn't fly. The underlying technology, though, is not a write-off, and can be readily deployed elsewhere.

In my opinion, this is not a development-team failure (the Wave dev team's enthusiasm and willingness to explain Wave was self-evident, and the thing worked okay when it launched), but rather an object lesson in how technology like Wave is a product, and that product needs to be managed by someone other than the dev team.

In other words, would we buy a tube of semi-sticky glue? No. Would we buy a packet of Post-It notes? Yes.

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

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Tech75 (not verified)

at 21:06 on August 4th, 2010

That's very true. Google wave was supposed to be dead long time back. I don't know how it survived for so long. It did not get much public attention as compared to other social websites like Google Buzz, facebook and twitter.

Andrew Sittermann (not verified)

at 06:14 on August 5th, 2010

It's a real shame. The real-time multi-user apps supported by wave have a great future. We have a Google Wave travel-planner called "Travel WithMe", and people love the real-time experience. Sensing that wave might not be going places, we've put it on facebook now as well, but still with Google Wave's realtime features. It's at apps.facebook.com/travel-withme.