Adieu to Google Wave

Monday, 9 August 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

Amidst much brouhaha and fanfare, Google announced the creation of a new collaboration system called “Wave” about 18 months ago. As with many of Google’s applications, participation was by invitation only. On August 4, Google announced that it was shutting down the Wave service at the end of the year. This morning, eWeek ran a short piece giving their reasons for the demise of Wave, but I have a few of my own.

First off, let me be clear that I believe the concept behind Wave is outstanding. It was the implementation that doomed Wave. The ability to do real-time collaboration from any Internet connection has so much potential in so many fields that its benefits should be apparent to any but the most rabid Luddite. So here, then are my reasons for the crash of Wave.

Finding out about Wave was hopelessly complicated and Google made it virtually impossible to learn more. Being the kind of guy that tries to stay current on what’s going on in the industry (emphasis on “tries”), I found out about Wave within a day or two of its demo at a developers’ conference last year. I’ll confess that I was really jazzed about it and immediately put myself on the waiting list for an invite when it went live a bit later in the year. I never heard back from Google, never received an invitation, and even Googling “Google Wave” only took me to the page where I first asked to get in. Zero marketing and zero linkage to GMail or Google Apps. Google was relatively good about updating their Wave blog, but that didn’t do anything for getting hands-on with it.

Connecting with Wave was hopelessly complicated from the outset and the Google developers didn’t make it any easier. Unlike Facebook, which makes it rather simple to connect with friends, family and coworkers (and people that you don’t know and probably don’t want to know – a topic for a different rant), connecting on Wave was pretty much limited to people who were (1) already contacts through Google and (2) subscribers to GMail and/or Google Apps. If you wanted to Wave with your Great Aunt Bea, you had to send her an invitation (of which you had only a limited number), which she had to accept and then create a Google account. Then you had to work your way through getting onto each others’ contacts so that you could then invite her into a Wave.

Using Wave was hopelessly complicated from the outset and the Google developers didn’t make it any easier. No documentation to speak of and finding the answer to any particular question using the online help articles is often like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s pretty bad when someone outside of Google has to write a users manual for the product (and a rather lengthy one at that).

Becoming a Wave user was hopelessly complicated and Google didn’t do anything to make it any easier. Think about it. Here we have a product that Google wants people to use, but they make it by invitation only and then make getting an invitation difficult. Remember that I asked for an invitation right after they demo’d it? I finally got an invitation. Not from Google, but from one of my students and about 5 months after it went live. And I wouldn’t have received that one if I hadn’t just happened to mention it to someone who had an invitation to give. We want you to join the club, but you have to know the secret handshake before you can join. Oh, and we’re not going to tell you where to find someone who can show you the secret handshake.

I’m still jazzed about Wave’s potential, but Google handled the marketing and implementation of this great idea so badly that I don’t think it ever really had a chance. But at least they’ll get a good tax write off on the R&D.

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