You know, I feel a little bad for the Etherpads. They were gonna go off and work on a totally new project as big shots and now they have to spend time supporting a software product that they've already EOL'd.
Also, if support becomes too much of a burden, I could see google having them train 1 or 2 google employees to do a lot of it.
These guys are some of the best real-time web programmers in the world. Google just spend "low eight figures" and tried to kill their product immediately. They clearly want them to spend as much time on wave as possible, so they'll find a way to make that happen.
WHAT? Come on. Do you not think other programmers do real-time web things, and have been for years? sigh
Saying that real-time/comet/AJAX/[technology name] isn't hard is meaningless. I can easily say, for example, that "programming in C" isn't hard. I just don't see what your point is.
I hate this trend of coming up with fantastic buzz words and making people believe they're something new/hard/fantastic.
2. because people have been doing it for a long time means it isnt hard? there isnt any way to read that that makes any sense, brain surgeons have been around a while, its still pretty hard.
like most people who complain about buzzwords you are actually putting more emphasis on the 'buzzwords' than the actual point.
I find the recent trends in the industry to be extremely depressing.
In particular, they probably are the best people to join the Wave team because not only have they been doing real-time, they've been doing a real-time app that is very similar to wave, since they're both essentially documents (though wave is a little more like a series of sometimes-nested documents, but it's all the basically the same).
1. "Real-time" is nothing new
2. There are people who have been working in 'real time' web apps for years