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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

re: Google Wave

"why dead? - Google Wave was discontinued because there just weren’t enough active users. The IP was later transferred to Apache when the development was discontinued."

Kinda. But more accurately, there weren't enough active users because Google __completely__ botched the beta. In restricting the invites then prevented already establish groups for trying it. For example, if you have a group of 4 or 5 and not as many invites, it was no go.

Keep in mind, Wave was pre-Slack. The market was there. It was primed. It was waiting for something smart and collaborative. Yet Google did the one thing you don't want to do with a team-centric tool...intentionally leave out at least one team member.

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Wave, for all it's novelty, interesting parts and hints of genius ... was simply a terrible product.

It's I think the prototypical example of over-thinking, over-engineering.

Most successful things are essentially simple.

Slack is embarrassingly simple.

... it's simple, and getting quality, end-to-ed experience, and getting 'the small things' right, and maybe being great at some things while forgoing others, i.e. 'having an opinion' or 'focusing on a segment'.

I remember not being able to explain wave to anyone ...

Well, we obviously can't debate the difference in success of these two products. That's in stone.

But in terms of usefulness and delivering something that is truly useful and enabling of collaboration? Then in the Wave v Slack battle, Wave wins. Being able to describe Slack, doesn't mean it's useful. (Note: I'm not saying that simple doesn't help with traction. It does. I'm putting the actual products toe to toe.)

Don't get me wrong. Slack is great (if your alternative is email) but it's not the end in that space; at least I hope not. If you were to sit down and ask, "What if...What would a next Slack look like?" you'd likely end up with something close to Wave.

Today? What is Wave? It's all the things you wish Slack was ;)

I think that the success of Slack fairy strongly validates it as being 'more useful' than Wave.

Google has the brand power to get as many people as they want using something, and it's free - and people chose not to use it.

Conversely, slack was a tiny startup with no marketing budget, to start, and people are actually paying $ for Slack - so that means a lot.

More people use =/= more useful.

More and more we read about people / teams de-Slacking. why? Because it's just not delivering the value they need. It's effective __ but only to a point__, and then it becomes the bottleneck. Yes, it's a great screwdriver, provided you don't need a hammer.

I'm not disputing Slack is a more mass market product - just like USA Today is not The Economist. Wave was a new, different, and I'm maintaining arguably better way to look at team comms / collaboration / building a knowledge graph.

Let's not confuse Google's cluster-fucking the execution of the rollout + marketing with the value of the idea itself.

Google had the power, yes. But they botches the beta. The sad thing, they did the same for G+. That is, they didn't learn from Wave.

One could argue that Wave would have eventually ended up as 'simple' as Slack, if they had persevered.

That said, Wave beta was a mess of "uh? aha... mmm?"

I honestly think that live typing was a large part of Wave’s failure. It seemed like a great idea on the surface, but in practice what you initially type is rarely what you want your response to be. It was a really painful feature that few people seemed to like, but Google doubled down on it, eventually removing “Draft” checkbox that allowed you to disable it.

The feature was later picked up by Google Docs, where it is quite useful.

Most of Wave could probably be replaced by a shared Google Doc instead. But then if you remove all that stuff, I'm not sure if what's left is really worth introducing a whole new paradigm for. I think the lesson really is, if you need that kind of workflow, just use a live doc.

I was extremely fond of Wave when it came out, but remember few people I knew shared that view. Now I am trying to think back to Wave and how it differed from Slack... wasn’t it pretty similar?

Also Dodgeball was the predecessor to Foursquare. There's a lot of wasted opportunities here.

I'm fuzzy as well but afaik Wave had threaded / hierarchical comments. The way they did allowed for new threads to be spun off. It better reflected how conversations happen and knowledge is collected, related to other knowledge, etc.

It also had a replay feature. So if you had someone jump in the middle of a discussion, they could rewind, replay and see how it happened. As subtle as that might seem just queues and context help understand - the knowledge and the people / group.

Those were what I remember thinking "this is The One" only to see them walk away too soon.

I don't think Slack was around yet. If it was it was small and to me at this point at that time unmemorable.

From what I remember the problem I ran into with Wave was basically a 'tyranny of structureless-ness' kind of thing. Theoretically, I much preferred the flexibility, but in practice I have to admit that the much more restrictive approach that Slack takes (single-level main channel chat + replies to main chat messages in sidebar) seems to work better.

No doubt it had its flaws. But those could have been worked out. Unfortunately, it was as if Google wanted to say this is how YOU are going to work, and wasn't interested in the possibility that they could be mistaken.

File under: great idea! Poor execution.

The latter was so bad I'm still surprised no one else picked up the idea and ran with it. It wasn't the idea that failed. It was the brand / company / org that conceived it.

In term of functionalities, Wave was wait above Slack from my point of view, it was the good tool to do collaborative work with real time multi-users document edition for example (today available in google docs), easy inline images in messages. I'm only using slack for messaging (as an email alternative).

I'm kinda shocked by the comments referring to Slack. Wave was very different from any other chat platform. You could edit everything, add different media elements to the document/channel and keep commenting everywhere on everything. Slack to me is really just another chat software. I see very little difference between it, campfire or Hipchat and honestly for the life of me don't understand why everyone transitioned from Campfire to Hipchat and now to Slack.

Yeah, although I use and enjoy Slack at work, I see it as a watered down version of IRC.

Why does slack feel watered down?

Wave was closer to natural (offline) human conversation / collaboration. Slack, god bless it, is closer to a traditional forum with a different UI.

Wave was a leap forward. Slack maybe a baby step.

Well hipchat to slack is probably explained by the buyout :-)

Yeah I remember it being more like OneNote than a chat app. At least that's now I remember trying to use it. Maybe it was something halfway in between. As much as I tried to use it, it never really caught on. Can't really remember now.

It was like slack, but way better! I'm still sad it died, and still secretly hoping someone is working on "Wave Phoenix". My favourite feature of it was to replace/augment the comment fields on my blog posts with "waves". When anyone posted a comment on my blog, it would appear my Wave client inbox like it was a regular-ol' email thread - and I could reply in-place (and real-time).

It was a pretty exciting concept to me that ALL of my interactions for various disqus-like random posts, emails, blog comments, forum replies etc - could be handled from the Wave client.

But they realllly bodged the roll out. First it was the "developer-version" where everyone could pile-on - and it was madness. You could actually "reply all" to EVERYONE. Like sending a @everyone slack message to every slack channel! Chaos!

Then they went to the"invite-only" phase - and suddenly the whole thing became a ghost-town, and there was no incentive to open your wave client.

I wish they had have nailed it, because I'm positive there was a good idea underneath it.

That lack of invites completely doomed G+, too. Social networks are valuable because of network effects, and you can't get network effects when you dramatically limit the possible number of users possible.

Invites are absolutely, 110% the first and foremost reason that Wave failed.

You absolutely cannot have a group-based system that does not immediately allow a full group to join.

Can you imagine if Slack relied on invites?

I was so bitter over not getting an invite for Ingress for months and months that once they opened it I had no interest.

For me it was the fact that you had to check the app for new messages. There was no option to send an email when you got a new message. I realize that sounds silly, but that's how you bootstrap a messaging platform. Facebook still sends me emails for notifications and that's how I like it.

Same problem as Google+ at the beginning

Thx. I tbought so but I was thinking it was my anti-Google bias getting the better of me ;)

With G+ it was "didn't they learn anything from Wave?"

You could just as easily be writing:

"Google __completely__ botched the beta. In having an open invite, they were unprepared for load. Since it was a brand new system, with a ton of interested users, the system completely bogged down. This was completely predictable with a new protocol, a new app, and Google's prestige. Why they didn't restrict the beta is beyond me."

I loved the idea of Google Wave, but the implementation was bad. It was just too slow and clunky and complicated.

I liked google wave and I think it was a good example of a product that was ahead of its time.

I remember Wave. It was terribly slow (both server-side and client-side), complex, and complicated to use.

Live typing was a horrible idea too; it looked like it was there just to show they could do it (it was somewhat impressive at the time that you could do that on a website).

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