Google Ceasing Development of Google Wave | Hacker News Reader

Google Ceasing Development of Google Wave

techcrunch.com

51 pointstessro8 comments

This is depressing to me. The interface still left a lot to be desired, but I was using it very successfully at my startup to collaborate on documents and interact with coworkers.

It never experienced the explosive growth they were hoping for, but I figured it was a long term play. I guess new strategic priorities ("Kill Facebook") are getting in the way of ongoing development.

If they can get people via online casual gaming, which seems like their new strategy, they have way more chance.

People were never going to suddenly start using wave en masse. It doesn't solve a problem that they couldn't solve other ways.

It solves the problem for remote teams of how to efficiently collaborate online. I don't know of any better solution for that problem, do you?

You were the first to submit this, but the discussion seems to be at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892

The announcement is on the official Google blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave...

This is very sad. I thought it was a great product but suffered from lack of good marketing AND positioning (as in it wasn't good enough to do what Google wanted it to, and it was never marketed adequately to fill a niche). In particular: - It isn't a good replacement for email because there is no integration with gmail or other established mail systems. - It isn't good enough for creating documents (blogs, company documents) because there was no security (ability to make something read-only to certain people). - It isn't good enough as a collaboration tool because after a few people edit a Wave, it looks so confusing - you lose all notion of it being a single consistent document because it looks too much like a complicated chat.

I also wonder if it was just too heavy in terms of Javascript and network processing.

Either way, this is a big shame - I was very much looking forward to Wave taking a greater part in my tech life.

I wonder how long they've been planning it. The wave team was still promising API updates a few days ago (to fix some data api bugs with my wave client) http://micro-wave.appspot.com

It's especially odd as they just rewrote the wave API docs 3 days ago.

Ok, in other words google are becoming less willing to develop cutting edge technologies and are going to spend more time on making money out of their traffic (e.g. purchase of ITA and listing hotel prices).

If you make money on the internet from a sector that goole are / might be in, be very afraid.

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