It seems that not much more than a year after its inception, Google have pulled the plug on their Wave application. On the Google blog they have announced that they are halting development of the platform, mostly due to a lack of user adoption and also say that the service will be completely halted by the end of the year. Despite this, Google have hailed the many successes of Wave’s development which made it a worthwhile endeavour. However, no major success story ends with ‘ceasing development’, so what is the deal with Wave and why didn’t it take hold the way Google expected?
The Pros and Cons
There seems to be a split developing on the web, dividing those who thought Wave was a waste of time from those who think it was ahead of its time. Frankly, I’d stay clear of polar extremes and look at Wave from a neutral point of view. Google Wave did have a variety of very clever features such as the ability to drag and drop files from your desktop or live typing. The abundance of features that Google Wave offered all sound excellent in their own right, but combined it seems they didn’t gel.
To say that Wave was ahead of its time seems a little naive. Unless there’s some secret element of the service that I am missing then I would suggest that it was very much in the here and now. Perhaps saying it was ahead of its time is simply an easy expression to mask the fact that it’s hard to explain why it didn’t succeed. It had the capability to be a very complex ‘communication platform’ but exactly what is that? Communication platform is a pretty loose term. Wave had limited mail capabilities, an online document editor, messenger functionality and image sharing. So was it a social version of Google docs or a reinvention of email? Perhaps a messenger based business platform? Therein lies the problem…
Undefined Wave
The major issue that Wave had, was its lack of a clear foundation. No one seemed truly aware of what Wave's primary directive was as it offers too many possibilities. This lead to a lot of cross user incompatibility as the range of Google Wave saw many users applying it in very different ways. Not a good thing for Wave, a platform created to integrate not separate.
What seems to have happened is Wave has tried to be all things to all men (and women) making it a good whole made up of some great and some substandard pieces. If for example it had full email integration it might have had a clearer purpose.
Upbeat Google
It seems however that Google won’t rue this loss for very long. Having come out of their Google Labs, no real weight of expectation was put on Wave's shoulders. In Google’s take on Wave's shutdown, the main focus seems to be on the technologies and features that can be taken from Wave and applied to other applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc. It is likely that we will see little pieces of Wave in Google applications in the near future.
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