Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)
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Still, this tells me having the right ideas or the technology has nothing to do with releasing a "right"/successful product.
Wave is a good example. I think Stadia is another one, they checked out right as handheld gaming started taking off. Probably others once you start looking through everything.
They thought it seemed to complicated and stuck with email.
I’m haphazarding a guess that maybe Google didn’t stick with it because, if I recall, most if not all of their services were free and this one probably cost a lot to run without a clear monetization strategy. If it didn’t increase the size of a captive audience, and they weren’t willing to show ads in the product itself, and they weren’t going to get better data from users to inform their ad services elsewhere…why run it?
Of course that’s all speculation.
Unfortunately, for every other class, the Wave signups were so rationed that it was impossible to get everyone on it.
"Can we use Wave? No, Steve has been trying to get an invite for weeks".
“An app to collaborate on, but nobody to collaborate with” has to be the most economically destructive product rollout I’ve ever seen.
Having used Wave, it was very taxing on low-end computers, so I never ended up using the fancier features - we used it for a group live-watch of LOST every week with several other friends.
IMO, this is what killed it. There was so much excitement for Wave, but it completely failed to build the network effects it needed. If you had it, you couldn’t use it with all your friends no matter how much you wanted to.
The critical difference is gmail still worked just fine with hotmail, yahoo mail, aol, etc. Wave was useless if both sides didn't have it.
There was also plenty of talk about the "eventual" email bridge and real multi-server Wave federation, neither of which properly happened. (At least not in the invite months).
Though, yeah, Wave really could have used the network effects of non-scarce invites, because it wasn't as interoperable or as much of an "open standard" as it wanted to be. Or it should have had all that interoperability and open standards properly ready at launch and the Google server could have just been sold as the "best" of several options (and people waiting for invites could self-host; that might have done enough for viral class projects in college environments).
It flopped in English-speaking countries because invites were so limited when people first started talking about it, but became a success in Brazil and India as the buzz built a little later there, by which time it had become easier to get and share invites.
They then compounded the error by force-partitioning their users between the existing service and an invite-only New Orkut, with no easy way to communicate between the two.
That disaster was still playing out when Wave launched, so at least some part of Google ought to have been aware of the importance of network effects for a product of this type.
Every public-private interaction needs to be obviously infoflow symmetric..
previous example of putrescence was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231879
Where the author was not responsive to interesting comments that do not obviously provide direct utility to his social-protocol proposal
(Def of DU here: https://archive.fo/I0nO4#selection-1307.122-1307.226 )
https://wardenprotocol.org/blog/build-your-first-ai-agent-wi...
What could Wave have done better? explain why they need invites? Even better, expose their reasoning, eg they don't need to ease server pressure but they need quality signups? Anything fun I'm missing? Like skin-in-the-game moves from the private side, for macroscopic values of skin?
For Wave, I'd imagine they needed to publish data on which fun parts keep the new users returning ---there were MANY!
(So, we're both clearly not wishing to see their bugs from swiftly tilting these parts :)
google would really be awesome if PMs/VPs weren't so clueless and powerful.
I saw it as one of the first live collaboration spaces native to the web, not trying to be a paper document, mailed letter, or phone call.
As ever with Google ventures, especially during the DBE era, all they had to do was stick out and let it take on a life of its own. But I think what it takes for growing into an organic identity is more than the average time a developer works on a Google project.
Those phrases weren't wrong, but it was like the proverb about the blind men feeling the elephant: one man thought Wave was like email, one man thought Wave was like a wiki, one man thought...
In retrospect, maybe Google should have said, "look, we can't describe it with words. Please watch this 1-minute video and you'll understand." ;-)
Somebody told them to advertise the benefits, rather than the what, and it leads unintelligible meaningless ad copy.
Probably, Google didn't want to limit what Wave was and wanted to learn from user usage patterns that people invent. Give people a blank slate and they know to take notes or draw. Give them a blank slate with knobs and drawers and zippers, and they will be wondering "what does this zipper do, why do I need that on a blank slate?"
It was magic for collaborative note taking. In lecture or if we divided up reading and summarisation. Also, of course, for scribbling together live memes.
Imagine being able to experience all the instants of your life in a single moment. Now do that with information and the connections with other people on various topics. You can see the whole thing at once and it updates in realtime!
Now granted I had hundreds of waves going and most of them didn’t warrant full attention, but it always felt like drinking from the firehose.
It made me want to quit tech and take up pottery.
With a new interaction model, it often matters more to build the path to get people there, not the new local maxima itself (unless you're going to get kids to adopt it first, but Wave was definitely not targeted at them).
The Wave "onboarding" experience definitely should have had more demo videos, had features that turned on or were discoverable slowly, or had sandbox rooms where you could try it out with basic bots. It's a major missed opportunity that Google didn't do this; it feels to me like Google didn't have an internal playtesting or dogfooding culture where they intentionally left some people out so they could be fresh. I wrote about how to build this culture here: https://dustinfreeman.org/blog/playtest-rituals/
They promised a feature that would enable waves to be embedded into normal web pages. This would allow me and others to collaborate on waves, but for the results of our work to be publicly viewable in a read-only fashion.
Because they never delivered on that feature, I never actually used wave much. There was no reason to because as a private-only space it was just a weird chat room / document.
Even if someone else doesn’t think that feature was important, I still think their biggest failure was simply not continuing development. They released it and hardly updated it at all. Even if it wasn’t getting traction out of the gate, they were on the right track. They just had to keep iterating and it would have ended up in the right place. They just gave up almost immediately.
Wave was a technology demonstration that eventually became Google Docs collaborative editing.
In my books, that's a major success.
> Waves are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications.
The following section suggests that the Wave team had a specific goal related to rich text OT extensions, which were NOT trivial at the time:
> There are others that offer rich text, such as Google Docs, but do not offer a seamless live concurrent editing experience, as merge failures can occur.
It also suggests that it was specifically intended to be featured later in Google Docs (it would not make sense to dunk on their own product). It actually doesn't matter if it is the same team or not. It is common to have a dedicated R&D separate from the deliver team for such breakthroughs.
If you have any doubts about it, feel free to contact Google.
You just quoted a part where it mentioned that google docs didn't have collaborative editing at the time. That's not the same thing as saying that the google docs collaborative editing was then based on google wave.
Again, you may very well be right, but you haven't provided any source actually indicating that google docs collaborative editing was based on wave.
Let me sum up this:
Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.
What if it was made by another team?
It doesn't matter. Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.
What if they discarded the entire Wave codebase?
It doesn't matter. Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.
What if both teams were researching the same stuff?
It doesn't matter. Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.
--
Up until I mentioned OT, there was room for ambiguity. Was I talking about the _product_ becoming Google Docs or the _technology_ being used in it? The onus was on me.
As soon as I clarified the issue, you should have recognized what I was talking about. You didn't.
The UI was slow due to the browser not being able to handle it. A new Wave with top performance on phones would have a chance of becoming a thing.
The first is: what problem does this solve (for users)? That was never clear. It always seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Any communication platform needs to ask "how does this compete with text messaging, group chats and email?"
The second is: this was peak "startup within Google" experimentation. And it cannot work. No new product will be able to compete with existing billion+ dollar businesses. There's no incentive to succeed and political inertia preventing you doing anything. A whole bunch of people got a ton of equity thrown at them for mediocrity.
Third, Wave was still in the era when Google was pushing Google Web Toolkit ("GWT") as a solution to UI engineering. This didn't really solve any problems and created a bunch of new ones. For example, for the longest time (this was eventually fixed many years later) you had to use special versions of protobuf Java classes.
Lastly, i believe I heard that the internal implementation was incredibly complicated such that people managed to produce the same functionality with a fraction of the source code in Python/JS.
Before Wave we used email only, and Wave was an improvement. IIRC there was a module/addon for RNG that we adapted for 'dice-rolls'.
Many of the features that were revolutionary did get baked into docs over the years. I don't think people realize just how similar google docs has become to wave over the years.
The parts missing are the breadth of features and extendability.
Also, I have always been a fairly clever programmer (starting to code around 1964) but I gave up trying to work with the Wave code base.
I feel like you could rewrite the whole thing today in about 1/20th as many lines using modern tools & frameworks.
Thanks for trying to keep it alive. That was a tough thing to do!
We loved it but we were also software engineering students so I guess we were ahead of the curve and we were still in our Google-honeymoon state....
Nowadays, business is done on slack, more casual interaction happens on discord. Email is still there when a paper trail is desired for business reasons, but I interact with few firms that use it as their primary means of coordination, planning, or communication.
The Internet at that conference was awfully intermittent (ironic considering this was Google), and I have fond memories of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over the connectivity hiccups:
At that time, email was kind of a safe, frozen thing, interconnectable between all providers. Wave was the first step to a walled garden, and doing everything but too many things.
And in the end, people like gmail because it used to be light, fast and sleek at that time. At the opposite wave was slow and very heavy.
I remember us struggling with drawing a gantt, using the limited (and poorly documented) API. Just as we were sure we have got a product, they announced it will shut down in such a such months or so.
Now you get that in Figma, Linear, and others but it's still a feat.
Looking forward for Patchwork to come out and see if it can generate that magical feat again: https://www.inkandswitch.com/project/patchwork/
Funny how these things go, sometimes.
All wrapped up in one huge wave of information overload.