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Comment by schpaencoder | Hacker News Reader

You know, I think google wave was so close to this augmenting human intellec thing, perhaps the product was killed because it threatened to cannibalize other segments of up and coming products from google, I have no idea.

But I clearly remember the feeling I had when discovering it.

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I think they were a little ahead of the curve, it was a unique product and worked for me in a way little else does, interoperability has often been sacrificed for commercial reasons, look at the history of data formats, HTML succeeded because of it's slow growth. Take the flood of frameworks built on PHP and MYSQL to implement database driven websites a lot of wasted time. I think the lesson learnt is to look for an open source project that is closely aligned with your goals and fork it, I see many hundreds of hours of wasted dev on competing approaches to solve the same problems often because of an ideological or system/platform oriented opinion, the successful ones often seem to be a single designers vision who has done a great job of documenting the project with clear code structure to make the job of on-boarding new developers straightforward and make the product appealing to new users.

I think the idea was good, but it was simultaneously over-engineered and under-engineered. Over-engineered in that it tried to do too much in too complicated ways. Under-engineered in that they didn't then invest enough in evolving the technical solutions into something more reasonable.

I'd like to see someone try to simplify it into a more workable starting point.

Who knows what the political problems were (Wave was an acquisition), but technically I think it was held back by OT being a poor fit for the front end stack at the time: Google was making most of their webapps in Java compiled to JS.

The modern virtual DOM-diffing approach is a much better fit for OT, and I'd love to see someone try again.

It also didn’t really perform well at all.

This was the major barrier to use for me. Every new message in a thread made performance a little bit worse. A thread with 100 messages in it was distinctly laggy and unpleasant to use on my Core 2 Duo laptop.

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