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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial proposal.

But the rollout, that was just the worst way to ever get a product into the hands of users. If you got in they gave you some number of invites. You'd set them up to be sent out to your friends or coworkers or whatever. Turned out, it just put them in a queue to eventually get an invite. Wave was fundamentally a collaboration platform, without anyone to collaborate with it had zero value. Fantastic way to fail.

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Wave's rollout was botched, its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware, and its UX (which didn't seem to "get" that sometimes you need to isolate your current work context from the global feed of activity in order to focus) was perplexing. But its legacy of helping to popularize Operational Transforms (and by extension, CRDTs) beyond academic circles did indeed live on - for instance, OT was adopted in Google Docs [0], and CRDTs were used in yesterday's release of Atom's real-time collaborative editing [1]. So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do.

[0] https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...

[1] http://blog.atom.io/2017/11/15/code-together-in-real-time-wi...

> its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware

For 2009 hardware running javascript in a browser, you mean? I was running much fancier native stuff much faster (including 3d games) on low-to-mid tier 2009 hardware.

> So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do.

I think it definitely accomplished its goals technically, but it certainly failed on adoption. I personally never got into it. I tried it quite early and didn't like it. It was clunky and confusing and didn't seem very useful to me at the time. I wonder if it were re-created with slicker UX (and good performance), would I like it...

Seemed like the main place people would use Wave would be massive company email chains, and they killed it 3 months after adding it to GApps

But, 3D in a browser is much easier since the GPU takes care of it. Low-latency audio is much harder.

Internally in Google it was really, really hard to get in the Wave team. So many people felt the opportunity to show what they can and get a career boost. So, presumably, they had best Google engineers working on that product.

What I want to say is an obvious thing -- stellar team doesn't imply success.

thanks for the anecdote! the politics must have been savage. also means the team probably cared more about being on a cool project than the actual problem area itself.

The alternative facts: maybe the great team they had did maximize their chance of success, it was just one of those 90% of "startups" that don't hit the market.

That's a good excuse for a product that fails to profit. But a team definitely isn't "great" if it can't release a coherent, useful prototype to the market.

FWIW, the core Wave team are back together again, working on language translation. See lexy.io

I agree. Looking back though, I think that platforms such as Slack, have incorporated many of the key things that made Google Wave a great concept.

True. Chat bots supply some of the functionality. In Wave you could have bots which would replace, alter, or add content based on things you typed in or some other rules. Like you could have a stock ticker bot, or one that inserted maps, or ones to do live translations.

The collaborative document editing in Google Docs improved afterwards, the Google Wave wikipedia entry doesn't mention this but I have some vague recollection of some of their work being migrated into Google Docs to improve it in that regard. That may be completely wrong though since I can't seem to verify it.

Indeed, and the technologies developed there made their way into Slack, Google Docs, GMail / Inbox, and a bunch of other products.

My recollection is no one could figure out what it was or how it worked... and yes, no one to figure it out with.

My primary recollection of Wave was that it ran really slowly on the browsers and computers I had at the time, which also wouldn't have helped.

Yeah browsers weren't very fast at the time and we still used flash.

I liked Google Buzz! and was sad to see it go away.

They used invites for the Gmail rollout as well but maybe those immediately created accounts. I seem to remember invites being sold on eBay.

The difference is once you got a Gmail account you could immediately start sending and receiving email from it rather than twiddling your thumbs till someone you know got invited.

This, and also that GMail solved a need you already knew you had, and could be explained in a few words: practically unlimited inbox space, no need to delete emails anymore! Everyone wanted that, but most people didn't know exactly why they should want Wave.

Gmail invites, by 2004 or 2005(?) when I got in were instant. If I sent the invite, the friend had a chance to sign up right then.

But email was already an existing protocol. So invites meant nothing. I could still communicate with my family even though they were still on their ISP account. Or my sister with her university account.

I was so hyper. And then it did Not even work on my computer. Dont remember Why, but when it finally did it was already dead.

i mean... there was another product that Google rolled out that was on an invitation basis. Last I checked Gmail is doing pretty well...

facetious comparison aside, i think the (Yegge)? rant about how Google does things applied here.

It's pretty hard to socialise on a network where you're the only one there....

Unlike Wave, you didn't have to wait for your friends and colleagues to get a Gmail account before you could talk with them. You could talk with anyone.

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