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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree with everything Scoble wrote, but it's definitely interesting. One thing I think he doesn't really talk about: whether Google wants to build things like Instagram.

The Google Wave example is a telling one - Wave wasn't the success Google wanted, so they scratched it. Nevermind that there were great uses for Google Wave, and there were probably hundreds of thousands of users on it, at least, who really liked it. In Google's eyes, Wave didn't succeed in becoming the huge hit they wanted, so it was a failure.

A small startup would have considered it a huge deal and pivoted on Wave's good uses until they turned it into a much larger project, IMO.

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> "...and there were probably hundreds of thousands of users on it"

I'd be really surprised if usage was that high. I'd believe there being maybe a few thousand using it regularly.

I know 3 completely separate (and non-tech focused) groups of people (each 30+) that were/are running on Wave and are each pretty upset that its going away. I know that each of them came to swear by Wave for almost all intra-team communication.

It wouldnt be a stretch for active users to run into the high tens of thousands. Unfortunately, thats tiny compared to the usage of Google's high-profile projects, so it gets killed.

If you want a conversation between more than two people, Wave kicks everything's ass. And unless you're the kind of group that's comfortable with setting yourself up a phpBB, I can't even think of anything that comes close.

Wave's problem wasn't that it's not useful, it's that nobody knew about it (of people I know, it had 0 adoption outside of computer geeks), and it couldn't integrate with desktop applications. A lot of us are stubbornly hanging on to Mail.app and Entourage because they integrate with our workflow better than web based solutions.

If google had come out with a a desktop Wave client that worked with OSX's address book, photo libraries, etc, it would have had a lot more draw. That sort of integration is less expected on Windows, but I'm sure they could have come up with some compelling features that the website didn't offer.

I completely agree. I know from my experience that if I could have just put in my normal Google Apps email and pushed everything through Wave, I would never look back. The fact that it was a self-contained, closed system killed a lot of its usefulness.

The technology behind it seems to have made it into Google Docs (real time collaborative editing). There are plenty of people using Google Docs.

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