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I think I sort of agree with you.

But I think that imposition of workflow is not taken kindly by users, users only like things in line of the status quo.

I think the greatest sin by Google was shutting down Inbox. I swore by it (the little travel cards, the ability to see and search email quickly -- e.g. the image previews, every day Gmail angers me because I cannot do things I could once do with incredible ease).

They should have had Gmail as a conservative conventional email tool, and slowly morphed Inbox to have Wave-like features. Slowly, iteratively, so that users could discover and organically make their own workflows.

Absolutely, our problems are not technical they are social and you overwhelm them with a lack of direction and too much choice, most folks, myself included will get paralyzed with what they should do next.

Checklists and linear flows are extremely important. Just look at how different bug systems or wikis are used by groups, same tools, different groups and their usage patterns are totally different.

Wave should have been a platform, and the workflows should have been curated as an organization specific behavior.

Somehow that didn’t seem to be a problem in Minecraft or git.

I think that there is a value in making software that is powerful and does not immediately make apparent precisely how best to use it. Examples also include NLE video and audio suites, and much CAD/3D tools.

Your tools do a thing. The operator makes the workflow. Make good tools, not a yellow brick road sold as one-size-fits-all.

The first few times I opened Live or Illustrator or After Effects or Sketchup I had no idea how to use them; I had to watch tutorials on YouTube to learn the mental models.

What webapps are like that? I offer that they have a corresponding loss of power.

Git is a problem for a lot of people. And A/V tools only become useable if you follow tutorials or courses - there are entire companies making their business on selling pro tools or after effects tutorial videos.

Maybe we should allow a market for education rather than assuming everyone should be able to use a starship with only 5 seconds of looking at the user interface.

I don't think this works in a market economy - some people are able to "use a starship with only 5 seconds of looking at the user interface". So they will always be incredibly more advantaged that people who aren't able to.

> Somehow that didn’t seem to be a problem in Minecraft or git.

Quite a few people are paralyzed by exact that issue in Minecraft. And quite a few people overcome that paralysis only because their friends or parents play and show them what to do or because they run into entertainment channel that is primary fun, but also guides them later. There is significant network effect in Minecraft.

The lack of initial guide combined with worlds being set on survival and with third person being default means that someone has to explain the game to you, else it is boring crap.

Git is perceived as more complicated to use then it should be by many people. The thing with git is that you dont have choice and have to use it.

Yet somehow both Minecraft and git are massively popular, despite these facts.

Git got massively popular, largely because Linus Torwarlds made it and started to use it for Linux. The mercurial was competitor, but was commercial and did not had such popular person and popular project behind. That does not mean problem did not happened, that means that when enough people have to use it (due to Linux) then you can start network.

Minecrafts ability to overcome the paralysis due to there being sufficient social pressure to overcome it so that you join friends and there being basically universal adult approval of the game does not mean the paralysis does not happen for many people. It is also sufficiently youtuber friendly, meaning you can do things even non-players find fun to watch on youtube. These things help to overcome paralysis which absolutely happens, especially when they are attempting to play alone and did not learned from youtube videos wtf they should do with it.

The wave could not possibly have "there will be fun with friends" nor "you wanna be like the other kids" attraction Minecraft had to overcome the same issue.

Mercurial was not the commercial competitor to Git. The commercial predecessor to both Git and Mercurial was Bitkeeper. The Mercurial and Git projects were both started as a response to Bitmover (the company behind Bitkeeper) announcing changes in how it would license Bitkeeper for open-source projects.

I never really understood inbox, and definitely didn't know that it was gone. I had some vague awareness that GMail was being rebranded as "Inbox" or something, when android pushed me a notification once. I guess I never figured out what it was.

Inbox was an experimental alternate UI for Gmail. Over time many of the Inbox features were added to Gmail, and eventually Inbox was turned down.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

By “many”, Google meant exactly two. The snooze function, and an Archive icon that appears on hover. Of all the Inbox features to migrate, those were all we got.

I was so disappointed when they dumped me back into what was essentially a legacy product. It would be like if Apple randomly decided to forcibly downgrade every device to iPhone OS 1.0. “You really didn’t need any of those non-phone functions anyway!”

In addition to Snooze and Hover Actions, there's Undo Send, Smart Reply, and Nudges which were all built and tested on Inbox before being added to Gmail.

Undo Send was definitely a Gmail "labs" feature long before Inbox existed [1].

You're right about the other two though. Nudges are nice. Ridiculous, though, that a useless gimmick feature like smart reply made it in but not actually useful features, like travel bundles or even the "finance" category.

[1]: https://mashable.com/2010/08/22/how-to-undo-send-in-gmail/

I used inbox regularly as a task/todo scheduler -- something I've never been able to get in the habit of despite many attempts with various techniques and softwares.

Get an email that means I have to do a thing? Swipe and schedule the email to come up when I have to do it. It comes up and I want delay, tell it to come up the next day. And use the exact same interface to create reminders for things that didn't originate in email. It made me more reliable and less stressed.

But I think the killer feature is it changed the way I interact with 90% of my email: I didn't. It was very good at showing me exactly the emails I care to interact with and no more.

I try to stay unsubscribed from all sorts of mailings but back on gmail I interact with way more mail I don't care about than I did with Inbox. Which has got to be bad for google, so when I say killer feature, I guess I mean it probably killed Inbox.

Wave didn't really fail. It was abandoned.

Microsoft Teams does this mishmash of documents, chat, file-sharing, notes, discussions, etc and is having good adoption. But Teams had several iterations and several years for adoption and wasn't abandoned.

Yep, as far too many people have discovered to their pain, that's the Google Product Way: throw something at the wall; if it doesn't stick and gain viral-like adoption in a short time, kill it and move on.

and product after product, it just seems that this approach isn't ideal at all, in any scenario.

I'm currently starting to use Microsoft Teams and I really dislike this mess, that said I use what other use so..

True, but at the same time this exact amorphousness and ability to step away from any specific workflow is what made Wave great - in my own subjective opinion.

I agree with the first two paragraph, but when it comes to the personal opinions - I disagree with the third. I did wanted a conversation to spring up in the middle of a document that was originally an email. That was novel, unique and empowering.

However, at the same time, I agree with the objective part that everyone had to invent their unique conventions, and many had struggled with that. I was just lucky that we had it "just for fun" and figuring out the ways we can use it was a rewarding experiment, not a struggle.

I feel similarly that there was a benefit and opportunity to the amorphousness of it.

At the time I was experimenting with a roleplaying game bot, and felt there was a lot of really interesting colloborative storytelling possibilities in the flows you could have. Start an action as an "email" to your GM, add a bot roll (or equivalent; the RPG I was using at the time was diceless) in the middle of it. Flow that into a threaded conversation about the results/consequences of the roll with your GM (and possibly other interested players), then use that conversation to clean everything up into an edited final "document" of that turn/action.

There's probably a lot of missed opportunity from Google having canceled Wave so soon after opening it to the public. There was a feeling, right up until Wave shutdown that a lot of people were in the middle of interesting explorations of collaboration forms, many of which we are unlikely to again see such a large scale experiment in.

Wave was brilliant, but in classic Google fashion it was developer-driven instead of UX-driven so it ended up as some platonic ideal product instead of something that actual lead people to do things they needed to do.

>it was developer-driven instead of UX-driven...

This right here speaks so much truth to so many side projects that into products that then fail.

I wish we could just make people smarter instead of having to dumb everything down with handholding UX. Too bad that's impossible.

In general, people aren't dumb. They simply don't care to learn how to use your software and just want it to "do the damn thing". Also, your software probably isn't as easy to use as you think.

Well, 50% of people are dumber than average.

50% are dumber than the median. Confusing mean and median might be a telltale for which half of the population an individual belongs to :-)

I thought we had all agreed to pretend that intelligence is normally distributed? ;-)

”Average” can mean either.

People are getting smarter as time goes on, so maybe we'll have good UX in a 100 years or something.

I don't see a contradiction between offering a task oriented "dumb" UI and surfacing a consistent model that allows people to get more powers if and when they need them. Good tools do both.

UX isn't, or shouldn't, be about dumbing it down. It's about really understanding people's problems and making sure you are actually addressing them.

In a way Wave had been that enabling technology by becoming a compelling demo of Operational Transformation that was later incorporated into many other products with much more focused workflows (e.g. Google Docs).

OT is always "just fixing this one corner case" away from working. I can't blame Google they dropped Wave, extending, maintaining and fixing OT for new kinds of data/operations is a nightmare I wouldn't wish to my greatest enemy.

this is absolutely the case. first product that really demonstrated what plausibly-real-time sync / collaborative editing on documents could feel like (and this is back when AJAX was still (kinda) fancy)

There's also just a lot of inertia embedded in existing conventions and paradigms. When the spreadsheet was still relatively young, there were a number of products that were spreadsheet-like but different and none succeeded.

Was the spreadsheet as we know it today the very best possible approach? Maybe. But not necessarily.

Of course, the original Visicalc model has been massively extended in certain ways. Take Pivot Tables as one example. But core spreadsheets as most of us use them are still basically Visicalc with a nicer interface.

Agreed. Many people say it but it seems lots of people who make new products forget — you have to meet the consumer where they are today and hold their hand to the bright future that you envision. Jumping directly to that future often doesn’t work because people aren’t quite ready for it or don’t get it. The iPhone started off ridiculously simple if you compare to what we have now with iOS 13 or whatever. If google just basically made google chat actually good and last forever then add features to it or something they could have probably brought people to Google wave eventually. But they launched it like you started watching season 2 of west world half way thru. It’s like... uh what is going on here, huh?

Yeah that hit the nail on the head for me.

You’re app needs work if people’s reaction to trying it out is, “ok... now what?”

>No, I don't want a conversation to spring up anywhere in the middle of a document. I actually loved Wave specifically because I could do this.

We'd start off an IM conversation, where we'd discuss basic points. Then we'd start editing prior bubbles and turn them into tables of content as well as chapters of our design document. It was a seamless flow from basic brainstorming into full-blown design documentation. So much mental overhead which would normally be involved - stuff like needing to separate in order to write the actual documents, then come back to combine it all - was removed entirely thanks to Wave.

> With Wave we had to invent our own conventions for each task

The same is the case with git. But git ended up a big success, while wave did not.

Ironically, we are most capable and productive when we're constrained and have limitations.

I think it's more apt to say that we are more productive when we don't have to spend time making decisions (or building entire workflows)

Nah, it's just that choice paralysis is bad

I had no such confusion, neither I required any guidance. I simply used it for my needs which it fit perfectly well (while it lasted). I know many other people who felt the same.

Wave is like Internet at the beginning of it’s rave. From one side of things it’s only sending packets to different addresses, on the other side you only needed a market to get a global economy depending on it.

Right ! Everything was do-able... nothing was easy...