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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Google Wave.

At work we use Slack, Email, Google Docs, etc. We’re never quite happy with how things work - what should be email vs Slack, at what point should a a Slack conversation become an email conversation to be visible to more people, when should that turn into a doc for a more formal review process, etc. We’re trialling Notion for some things and it’s good. What should be a Wiki?

Whenever we have any of these discussions, I always feel like we’re circling around what Wave once was, and potentially could have been. It wasn’t fully polished, but so many of the fundamental concepts were there. If it had stuck I think communication in companies would be much better than it is now.

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I agree! I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off. I'll admit it was a hard sell when you boot into a blank page that looks like a word processor.

It was sadly ahead of its time and was probably pitched to the wrong audience from the start. Rather than trying to explain why Wave is better than email and chat to the internet at large, they probably should have pitched it as a business productivity tool. Oh, well. Hindsight is 20/20.

> I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off.

I wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.

because that would have required a single product person, and Google have none.

Google only have failed engineers turned product manager. they live and die by some random metrics. the gmail PM would never accept anything there that reduced time spent (or some other random, disconnected from reality, success metric) by a second!

Yeah I'm not even sure that pitching it for business productivity would have been enough. The reasons it shines: chat, collaborative editing, blurred lines between documents, emails, and chat – those are built on concepts that didn't exist back then. We can see the value of it now precisely because we've had the intermediate stage of Slack/Docs/Gmail/etc. If that doesn't mean "ahead of its time" I don't know what does.

It wasn't only marketing. Either the codebase was bad or the browsers at the time were not powerful enough for it. I remember using it for a uni project and after a few messages got into the history, it kept getting slower and slower. At some point it took seconds of lag between the key presses and the result.

As great as wave was, it didn't work very well either.

If it was written in Angular, that sounds about right.

If im not wrong it was developed using GWT.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

It was open sourced as Apache Wave. Yes, it was gwt.

Wave predates angular, but good attempt at a dig?

Is Youtube written in Angular? I find myself having to refresh the page (Firefox is my default) to load the proper video fairly often; annoying UX.

I used Wave for handling projects with a remote team and it was fantastic once you got used to it.

We began project specs in ‘instant messaging ‘ type mode, and then back and fleshed out that conversation, editing the original posts to become full fledged documents. It was seamless.

Browser performance was a dog, bug I’m sure that could have been worked on.

Loved the ecosystem of apps and bots that was developing

I'll be the contrarian here. I tried wave and was never really thrilled with it. Maybe I would have grown to like it, but I never really saw its place in my workflows. IMHO it didn't do any one thing great. It also didn't really play nice with other applications. It was more of an all-or-nothing experience.

I think if it really was so great others would have copied it and made great clones. Given that that never happened it would seem that others were never motivated enough to build a clone, which tells me that it was never useful enough.

I would be happy to be proven wrong about what a great tool it was, but in the end it seemed like more of a cool tech-demo than anything great.

I think Slack gets close to some of my favorite bits: the ability to go back and edit messages, spawn threads that go off on a tangent, the way it can link nicely to referenced docs and JIRAs, etc. I have mixed feelings about real-time typing. But it feels like Slack's generation of chat tools have picked up some of the ideas Wave pioneered without being all-or-nothing or not being primarily a chat tools.

Google Wave was late to the Groove party — that also failed:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks

Ray Ozzie’s Groove was remarkable for distributed teams in the mid-2000s; I’d argue not yet replicated.

This is the first response I've read that has any legitimacy to it.

They were way too early to market. Supposedly their compensation is or was structured to reward shipping new products/features to an extreme degree. I wonder how things might have turned out if they "shipped" it internally first, and iterated on it a few more times before putting it in the hands of the public.

I think, one of the biggest mistakes was that it wasn't backward compatible with email. Currently, there is an opportunity to fix was has gone wrong back then with Chat Over IMAP (COI). Maybe OX the driving company behind COI will realize what kind of an opportunity they have to extend COI from a simple chat extension to a full-featured email 2.0

I too am disappointed that Wave didn't catch on. My hopes were raised when it move to Apache, but alas, it's retired now: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html.

What it would take to built a similar product now? Ten years later, the tooling and ecosystem for such complicated SPAs is much better, so it should be at least a little bit less of an effort, right?

Yea I would have assumed so - tbh this is still a massive problem I face in each new org I join. Documents/communications are scattered across google docs, notion, slack, jira.

Doesn't Notion try and solve this problem? What do you think Notion could do better to solve this issue?

Afaik several projects replicated what Wave did, since IIRC it was open-sourced. E.g. Rizzoma. Nothing came of them apparently.

Rizzoma looks interesting, thanks for sharing.

We are building a collaborative productivity tool at Taskade (https://taskade.com), in part inspired by Google Wave. Would love to get your thoughts!

We've drawn inspirations from Google Wave with Taskade (https://taskade.com), would love to get your thoughts! You can reach me at john@taskade.com

Apache Wave can be self hosted on sandstorm at least.

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