When I awoke this morning (actually a couple of hours after I awoke this morning thanks to an early morning airport run) I was greeted with the news that Google’s Wave project has been canned. Here is the official word over at the Google Blog, basically not enough people where using it.
The general consensus from folks around the internet is that nobody understood how to use it, Tech Crunch seems to think that is was ahead of its time (and totally stole my blog title…) while Gizmodo is just confused.
From my perspective (someone that spent several years working at a company developing next generation IP technologies, such as Video Telephony and collaboration) Wave was the future. Or rather the user experience that Wave was trying to be was the future. I spent years collaborating with developers, testers and managers spread across the globe, at one point I was working on a team that had people located in Denver (USA West Coast), New Jersey (USA East Coast), Pune (India), Dublin (Ireland) and Sydney (Australia), we needed a tool for our meetings that:
1. Had audio conferencing to talk to everyone on the call
2. Had video conferencing so that we could see the reactions of people on the call.
3. Had the ability to have sidebar chats to discuss small side points while being active in the current call, e.g. insight between local members of a team.
4. Allowed easy sharing, modification and discussion of documents.
5. Enabled collaborative white boarding (to allow quick drawings and discussion points to be shared).
6. Recorded the whole lot so that the members that where located in unfavourable time zones could see the results of the outcome and discussion. As well as allowing review and generation of minutes following the meeting.
Google Wave coupled with our existing technology enabled this, with a bit of work a seamless integration could be achieved. It seems to me that Google targeted the wrong group of users. It was always going to be hard to get a large enough following from the Tech crowd to push it into the mainstream, which is their usual method of developing and promoting new technology. They faced a barrage of other communication systems that people where happily using or adopting because of the simple use cases, Twitter, Email, Facebook Chat, Skype etc. Wave was kind of a combination of all of these crammed into one. Thus making it quite confusing at first (and second) glance, if the use cases weren’t immediately apparent to a user then they probably weren’t going to go to the trouble of signing up. Perhaps if it integrated better with gmail and google docs, these would have pulled people across. I feel the people that would have gotten the most benefit out of it never actually saw it or perhaps even heard about it.
Google have said that they intend to continue to work with some of the technology and to merge it into existing products so I hope that they work to get it into their corporate offering and integrated with Google Docs and Voice. If they do that then all the exciting parts of this technology can live on to see another day.
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