Why did Google Wave goodbye?
Today Google announced that they are no longer going to develop Google Wave and will leave their existing site, wave.google.com online for at least the rest of the year. So why did they give up?
The task was too great.
Wave is great technology, with great potential. And that technology still has the potential to grow. It's real-time collaboration tools were frankly impressive. But despite being more collaborative, more sophisticated and more extensible, it simply was not a replacement for email.
Wave lacked the presence that email has. It's prominence on every computer and mobile device has developed over the last thirty years. That's something that even Google couldn't achieve in a short period of time.
When email was devised it was inspired by what was then known simply as mail. Now affectionately referred to as snail mail, mail served as a pattern to help people understand what email was. Books helped us understand web pages. Early graphical user interfaces grabbed hold of a desktop analogy to describe computing. I'm sure you get my point now. We learn new technology by comparing them to things we understand.
Google tried to reinvent and didn't rely upon an analogy. To me I described Wave as one part email, another part instant messaging and another part something like Google Docs. Others shared that confusion. I remember participating in early Waves that more resembled IM conversations about how to use Wave.
Perhaps if Google had attached Wave to Gmail or Google Docs, tools with presence and strong analogies, it would have seen greater adoption. In fact, the latest update to Google Docs adds Wave-like collaboration. It seems, however, that Google was aiming for a greater plateau, but perhaps the email-status was too high for them to reach. For me when I heard people say "I'd use Wave if I got an email every time it was updated," I knew it couldn't possibly replace email. So when Email notifications came out several months ago, it was the harbinger of the end.
I'll miss the talk about Wave, but I think I'll miss the Piratify bot more. As he would say, "Goodbye t' Google Wave."
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