So everyone is talking about Google ditching Wave as a standalone product. Here are my three cents on why the experiment failed:
It wasn’t viral enough
Invite-only alpha for a “Communications” product is an oxymoron. Seriously, Google? I can picture this conversation happening in Google HQ, circa April 2009, a month before Launch, as the buzz was building up for Bing.
“Microsoft is launching Bing in a month’s time. We need something to steal the thunder. Are there any cool projects we can show-off”
“Yes, there is this thing called Wave. It is a totally cool way of communicating. Think Gmail, Twitter, Skype, Flickr and Google Talk in one”
“Cool. Let’s launch it”
“But it is not quite ready for prime-time”
“That is easy. Let us put an alpha label on it, make it invite-based. It worked out very well for Gmail”.
“sounds good”
Except it is not. This is a new way to communicate. Instead of making the invite a rare commodity (apparently some were sold in eBay, make it viral!) I got an invite relatively soon, **but it was useless, **since no one else from my social graph had one!
Too Radical and too complex : Even when people communicated, they just didn’t get it
And because they didn’t get it, they didn’t use it. Here is a screen-capture of a Wave between me and my friend. I consider both of us as early adopters of technology.
Obviously not “real-time” conversations! People aren’t using the system, you are not learning enough and you are creating artificial scarcity?
**Big-bang launches and radical ideas usually don’t mix well. **
Now imagine, if they had resisted the temptation of the big-bang launch, but did it more organically. They could have introduced Google Wave to Businesses First, so that you start with a critical mass of people collaborating from day one. They could then have incorporated aspects of it as part of Google Docs and ofcourse, Gmail. This way, you are also teaching people aspects of the new paradigm. This is clearly not as sexy as the Big bang launch, and clearly takes more time. But this would have significantly increased the chances of success. They should have done “Learn-Measure-Build”. In some ways, I think it was just “bad karma”. Everything about Wave’s launch went against Google’s “Dont be evil” philosophy. Between the urge to steal Microsoft’s thunder and seeing how well big bang launches are working for Apple, somewhere along the way, Google lost what it really stands for.
RIP, Google Wave. You were a good experiment that taught a lot to people outside Google as much as you taught Google. I think that is a lot more than what I can say for Buzz.
*Picture from Flickr, thanks to rjzii”