I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.
I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.
Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."
Apple usually mail the core experience with v1, but all the ancillary roles have to wait till v3 or v4.
Schmidt's decision has been borne out by events. Did Wave take off when open sourced? No. Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Also no.
> Did Wave take off when open sourced?
Eh, how many "dump and run" open-source projects take off? Bringing an opensource community to life is its own brutally hard problem.
I think Google's real error was not killing it too soon, but allowing it to be developed in a bubble and then springing it on the world with a giant, "Ta da!" It let them ignore a lot of real-world problems and questions, investing heavily in untested design hypotheses. Once you get to the point of a huge global launch, you've baked in problems in a way that is very hard to fix.
Slack.
Trello.
Schmidt was CEO from 2001 to 2011. During that time period, Google basically invented all the infrastructure we take for granted in distributed systems today, popularized the concepts of JavaScript-heavy web applications and Software as a Service, created from scratch a new browser (Chrome) and a new operating system (Android) which promptly dominated the market, and became one of the top five largest companies in the world.
I think he deserves some credit, yeah.
I don't think it's fair to say: "They only bought it so it doesn't count." You could just as easily say: "They only hired Paul Buchheit, he was the one who came up with GMail, not Google." Real inventions aren't spontaneous point events, they take many years of development, and can die anywhere along the way if you don't continuously create the necessary environment to foster them.
- Chrome - competitive play - iterative improvements over competitors
- Android - competitive play - purchased, playing catch-up to competitors
- Infrastructure - internal services
Basically, is he is more Xerox Copier division than Xerox Parc?
OTOH, when Larry took over, things became much more top-down, with Larry trying to be Steve Jobs and tell the company what they should be building next -- most notably when it came to Google+.
I left before Sundar took over so I don't know how he runs things, but it seems like Google these days is just sort of chugging along, building solid products but not doing anything revolutionary.
The Larry approach sounds more vision-led and its interesting how it looks when it fails. Its difficult to see beyond the survivorship bias and only see it as egotistical and ignorant failure.
The real mistake with Wave was that a group of incredibly smart engineers were basically allowed to go into a bubble and build whatever they wanted for an extended period of time. Successful innovation needs to be anchored by a real problem to solve. E.g. the best programming frameworks always come from someone who is building a real app on top, not from someone who set out to build a programming framework. The feedback loop is necessary to keep developers focused on the actual needs of users, rather than on whatever problem they find most interesting to solve.
I think Eric is referencing the poor usage numbers as a proxy for the fact that the Wave team was not building something that users really wanted.
(FWIW my own startup, Sandstorm.io, had a pretty poor record on this point as well.)
Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.
Making it even more ridiculous that they killed off Google Reader for it (or didn't bother to revive it afterwards)
EDIT: Also, they already had Picasa Web Albums since 2006. I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.
That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.
Problem wasn’t full resolution, it was re-compressing your originals. Photographers that care about full res, care about original quality.
While there were (and still are) options like SmugMug for photogs, Flickr was the only prosumer one supporting unlimited original quality.
Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much?
Turns out photographers who posted and curated 50,000 photos are not big fans of having the rug pulled out from under them by people in marketing trying to change the UI for their own engagement metrics.
I actually think that's somewhat fair. I could come up with some things that I wish were better with Flickr and there are probably lots of things I'm not thinking of. But I still use it and, in conjunction with Lightroom, I find it's a pretty good way to display a curated collection of edited photographs (as well as serving as a backup of last resort).
I did object to the big UI change a few years ago and still don't really love it. On the other hand, I don't actually use the web interface much. I upload from Lightroom and I mostly view from a tablet.
The machine learning assisted search. For example, if I want to find photos of whiteboards that I took to record a meeting, I type in "whiteboard".
Source: I am one of the original authors of Writely, did not work on Kix but I was still at Google when it was being written, had a minor role in reviewing the design.
Kix is a drastically different architecture than Writely, so many lessons would not have been applicable. Writely was built on a contentEditable DIV, so the data model was literally whatever junky HTML the browser's contentEditable implementation would create, and synchronization was implemented by performing three-way diffs on the HTML code. It was very much a dancing bear, in the sense of "the amazing thing is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all". ...but I digress. My point is that the mechanisms and challenges of that approach are entirely different than the Kix approach. I think the important lessons would have been product-level rather than code-level.
I don't know whether Trix originally used OT specifically, or the Kix team borrowed that idea from Wave. But the basic idea of clients performing small, tidy logical operations and then synchronizing them in realtime through a server was part of both Trix and Kix. Writely used a very different (and more primitive) approach.
I don't know anything about the origin of the comments feature, but my guess is that there was no connection to Wave, except (again) possibly a bit of inspiration. The Wave team was very separate, both geographically and organizationally, and the tech stack they built was very disconnected from anything that was going on with Trix, Kix, or Writely.
I was asking because I have a vague recollection that Kix borrowed OT ideas or even code from Wave. But then I was even more removed from both teams than you. Or maybe it was just an aspirational thing from management to find a silver lining in the Wave shutdown.