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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

Google Wave is exactly what I thought of. Like Wave, this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist. People are going to ooh and aah over it, and then keep using Slack and Google Docs.

s/Wave/Paper in this Wave obituary from 2010:

> Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. ... Despite its prodigious sophistication under the hood, the service never resonated with its target audience. Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface.

https://arstechnica.com/business/2010/08/wave-cancellation-g...

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The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave.

It's a small world. :)

This is the clearest explanation in this thread of what Paper actually is.

>The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave.

As a long time user of hackpad, it's nothing more than a glorified document editor, and very simple at that, with meagre "shared editing" capabilities that we've had for decades, even in desktop apps.

(The main reason I stuck with it is it's faster to load than Google Docs, and I only care about basic editing).

> this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist

At a certain level I wonder if this, like Google X, isn't more a recruiting tool than an actual product. Something to say "we do sexy things here".

I used Wave extensively with an international team for project management and we found it extremely useful. The main problem was i) Yes, you had to get around a new way of working that merbed previously seperate paradigms - ii) (the killer) performance in the browser was completely horrendous.

It was the cumbersome Web interface that was the main problem, rather (the execution) rather than the concept.

The functionality was polished and sexy.

The UI was clunky and the epitome of what happens when programmers design. Everything was jam packed into the screen so that it was immediately obvious what kinds of things you could do or how to go about what you wanted to do. It introduced a lot of concepts all at once, causing an unnecessary learning curve.

Heh, I had the reverse thought—if they let anyone who used the product near it they'd find SOMETHING that works!

There was a project that forked Wave when it was handed to Apache, can't remember the name but it seemed nice to use

Apache Wave https://incubator.apache.org/wave/

The spiritual successor was OpenSocial gadgets, also now gone except in some corporate spaces.

For those who wants to try, a demo is available on oasis.sandstorm.io

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