Every time I tell an engineer that I worked on the wave team, I'm greeted with the same response: "Oh, Wave! You know, the real problem with wave was X". And then I stop listening, and tell them this:

I have heard that for all the values of X. Here are the most common:

- It was too hard to use / I didn't know what to do with it

- It didn't integrate with email / didn't have email notifications

- It didn't support IE

- I started using it, but none of my friends were using it, so I stopped

- It was too slow

Too late, the team spent a bunch of time talking to actual users and finding out how they were using the product and what their real pain points were. People use wave to communicate in small teams. IIRC the biggest pain point our users cited was that wave didn't support printing. The people who did get over the adoption hurdle ended up using wave a lot. (I still wonder if maybe wave might have survived if we had charged for it.)

Wave died because we were too slow to make it good. The code base consists of around 1M lines of java. With 1M lines of code, you need a giant team to get anything done, and a giant team working hard on features tends to add even more code. The wave team burned too much money too fast. And we were still working too slowly to get explosive user growth. It made lots of people sad, but Google was right to kill wave.

If I could go back in time and give advice to the team, I would say:

- Don't use Java

- Don't scale past a few engineers. You will have a much longer runway that way, and you'll need it if you want to replace email.

- The network effect will kill you unless you integrate with email from day 1.

- You don't know what you're building, so talk to users early. Like, today.

- Don't optimise for scalability until you know what the product is supposed to be

- Don't try and reinvent the scrollbar, you idiots. (So much stabbing.)