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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

I was so hype for Google Wave. There is one major reason it failed.

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.

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They built a product that needed a bandwagon effect, rationed how many people could join the bandwagon, and then complained that not enough people were on it.

> their biggest failure was simply not continuing development

Wave was a technology demonstration that eventually became Google Docs collaborative editing.

In my books, that's a major success.

Was that functionality really based on work from Google wave?

Yes.

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20090531063923/http://www.wavepr...

https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...

Isn't this just showing that they both used OT rather than that the docs functionality was based on wave? It seems like the version of docs that added this was likely in development at the same time as wave so unless you specifically know that the people who worked on wave then worked on docs I would assume that different people were responsible for it so the fact that they both used OT (which is pretty standard) doesn't seem to necessarily imply a connection.

The following section of the Wave whitepaper suggests that the chat app aspect was minor to the project. It was all about solving collaborative rich text editing:

> 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.

I'm not saying it necessarily wasn't used in docs but it seems like you also don't have any information indicating that it actually was and are just assuming that it must have been, so I would ideally want confirmation from someone who was actually involved with it at Google.

I provided enough information, including the Google Wave team _explicitly_ citing the feature on Google Docs before it was launched. This is way more than an assumption.

If you have any doubts about it, feel free to contact Google.

> I provided enough information, including the Google Wave team _explicitly_ citing the feature on Google Docs before it was launched. This is way more than an assumption.

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.

I'm not confident you would be able to recognize a valid source if you saw it, and I'm not confident you understand what I claimed.

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.

I came here exactly to say the same, it’s a classical case of trying to solve a problem and end up with a completely different product. I think it was a great success, we used it at college for collaborating over documents, exactly the way we use Google docs now

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