Why did Google feel that Google Wave was a good product?

But what problem did it solve?

No one really seemed able to answer that.

When I looked at Wave I saw a set of primitives from which you could build email, IM, Twitter or any other number of communication mediums. The problem is that people could already do all of those things elsewhere. Did Wave make it easier? If it did, it might've stood a fighting chance. But it didn't. The UI was complicated. On most browsers it was slow.

Part of what made Google the search behemoth that it is (apart from the obvious algorithmic improvements over what came before it) was the simplicity of it. It was the simplest of pages (compared the shotgun portals of Yahoo and the like) with a giant text box. Anyone could look at it and know what to do. What's more it was fast.

So I would take Wave as an object lesson in what happens when you seek to solve an interesting engineering problem rather than build a product.

Google is probably discontinuing use of Wave because it didn't live up to their expectations and didn't have as many users as they need it to in order for it to be viable. If this were created by a smaller company, however, it could still be considered successful... I haven't been able to find any numbers on how many active users wave has but I'd guess somewhere around 50k - 100k... For any smaller company that'd be a huge success...

I'm really tired of reading all of the rhetoric that acts as if it's just oh so obvious that Wave isn't a good product. For 50k users it's a great product that they love... It doesn't need to have 2 million users to be a good product... Personally, I think Wave is a BRILLIANT piece of software and I use it exclusively for communication with my 6-10 close personal friends.

I have one gripe - the mobile interface is terrible... Maybe if this could've been fixed more people would've used it.

In addition, I was in a role where I spent half of my time communicating and collaborating with different groups, and after failing to be impressed with existing tools, I was particularly interested in seeing how Wave might make my role easier. And despite its various flaws, it did indeed make it better.

In the end, I'm happy that I joined the Wave team. It was a really interesting project to work on and a great learning experience.

The real problem for Wave was that it had a 20-60 minute learning curve, almost no one I knew was using it, and it was hard to convince people to use it because of the learning curve and no one else was using it.

New communication services need to provide big, obvious benefits over existing services, then communicate those benefits with early adopters in a way that trickles downstream.

If we can learn one thing from Wave, it's how deeply embedded existing communication methods are in our way of living and working; it's hard to pry business users away from email and social users away from Facebook even if you're Google.

In this sense, Wave wasn't a bad idea; it was a great idea ahead of its time. I suspect that communication methods that are natural evolutions of existing popular systems (e.g. fax machines, Skype) are likely to have higher adoption rates than methods that take brilliant leaps too far too soon.

One of the major factors for me was the crappy, slow UI.

Also, I think Wave lacked CONTEXT. It was great for collaborative editing, but which kind? With friends about parties? With classmates about projects? With colleagues about code? With customers about products? It imported a few Gmail contacts from each group, not enough for either one to make sense in the long run. It had some great features, but not enough for either one [compared to email/Facebook/specialized webapp].

It was a release and marketing failure. Should have been in the Google incubator at least another 6 months before Alpha/Beta, and shouldn't have made the huge mistake of releasing a product to users with limited invites when the entire purpose is collaboration. And that's what the focus of its marketing should have been: collaboration. Group chat, forums, and wikis, here's your replacement. Planning a trip or party? Use Wave instead of Gmail. That's all it needed. Geeks want to hear about the cool technology in it, everyone else just wants to know what the hell am I going to use this for.

Unfortunately, my colleagues are in the same room, and I already have other ways of communicating with my friends, so Wave isn't much good to me, and would probably never achieve mainstream success. It might have had a chance with corporations fed up with Outlook, though.

When I consider Wave in retrospect, I really think they limped in on this . It was a grand experiment. If they really wanted this to succeed, I don't think they would have proceeded with the launch the way they did. Reading the Quora answer sort of jives with this.

I'm surprised no discussion touched upon the Anonymous response in the Quora thread. It's more interesting than "why Wave failed" and is indicative of the state of Google. It brings an additional perspective to the discussion around Google's (apparent) talent retention problems. Combined with other anecdotal evidence, it really look like Google is at a loss for how to continually motivate employees with their current organizational structure

Submarining discussions and decisions (e.g. email's that don't include the whole group or that don't get shared with new members joining the group).

Excessive work to reconstruct discussions, events, decisions. (Again, "big wads of emails" being a typical example.)

Centralized, rigid access controls. (You have to go through systems administration to add somebody to a project. Sometimes, that in turn means management sign off. Quickly, you're back to copy/pasting crap into, oh, for example, email.)

Wasted time. For example, the last three points.

Lack of dynamic, group discussion separate from physical and chronological synchronization and separate from the need for productivity killing meetings. Some companies have (finally) caught onto internal bulletin boards and the like, for this. But then somebody has to set them up, add users and credentials, and centralize a whole lot of bureaucratic decisions that might better be pushed out to the teams involved.

Lack of a centralized, uniform project communication history.

Etc.

Anyway, Wave seemed promising. But the client Google offered up was unusable for most people. It was literally too slow, at first, on the client side. It reflected the worst of Google's trend to abandon discoverability in its UI. (I'm reminded of this in a smaller fashion every time I help a client's employee take the dive into their calendar product. I'd argue that Android has a fair amount of it, too.)

Also, early adopters would join and have no one to work with. Even when you could get someone else invited, most didn't want to tackle it. Growth stagnated.

I still think Wave' paradigm solves a lot of problems. Maybe Apache and third parties will have better luck producing a usable client.

P.S. There were also many niggles and problems with the UI, such as default decisions about account creation and account information sharing. The UI was, basically, quite underdone. Finally, Google didn't continue to pour effort into it nor give it enough time to take off.

In this case it may have been more successful if they developed and marketed it as an "live collaboration" extension to GMail or as interactive collaboration layer on top of Google Docs.

Because it required interesting technology and was challenging and fun to implement.

Because it solved problems (granted, all of the easiest and least important problems).

A lot of products are brought to market through the same flawed process. Look at the Segway for a perfect case in point.

If they take off, you're heralded as a genius.

If the flop, they question why you even started in the first place.

Wave was spin to try and reinvent internet communication. It wanted to merge email and IM and all these other communication forms together. Perhaps it was way too ahead of its time. Perhaps the execution was not as well thought out as it should have been. But the overarching concept is not ridiculous.

I use Wave and the main problem is the load time, and basically speed. They need to get some HTML5 and local storage into it, maybe some Node.js.

Also, Waves can seem to go on and on, and one forgets why a wave was created in the first place, and when one should be ended/closed.

So there should be a splitter button to start a new wave within an existing wave.

It's rather like a text chat with someone. You never know what's going to come up, so how can you categorize it before it's even begun? Or if you do, and it goes off-topic, then what? Do you head-butt a wall or do you go to the beach?

Technically it was great and had soon my attention.