Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)

I think this is a meaningfully different variation on the "Google doesn't commit to their products" convo. If we look at the subset of those where, retrospectively, we see that others enter the same space executed successfully and built big businesses, it's a new way of articulating Google's collapse of strategic vision.

Wave is a good example. I think Stadia is another one, they checked out right as handheld gaming started taking off. Probably others once you start looking through everything.

I tried to use Wave to collaborate on a blog post with friends, rather than emailing each other critiques.

They thought it seemed to complicated and stuck with email.

I’m haphazarding a guess that maybe Google didn’t stick with it because, if I recall, most if not all of their services were free and this one probably cost a lot to run without a clear monetization strategy. If it didn’t increase the size of a captive audience, and they weren’t willing to show ads in the product itself, and they weren’t going to get better data from users to inform their ad services elsewhere…why run it?

Of course that’s all speculation.

It wasn't the lack of foresight that failed Wave. People recognized it as the base platform for a lot of future applications. They botched the rollout instead.

It was a mystery at the time, but in retrospect it seems obvious that it was, at a minimum, a precursor to Slack and Teams. And could have been something else too, it was raw and open ended enough that new usage norms could have emerged and pushed it in any number of directions, setting the tone for any number of possible use cases. It could have been a social network, if the idiosyncrasies of community usage imprinted that on it.

As ever with Google ventures, especially during the DBE era, all they had to do was stick out and let it take on a life of its own. But I think what it takes for growing into an organic identity is more than the average time a developer works on a Google project.

I felt like Google was weirdly bad at explaining what it was. IIRC, they had all these vague phrases like "a new way to collaborate! Live! Shared spaces!"

Those phrases weren't wrong, but it was like the proverb about the blind men feeling the elephant: one man thought Wave was like email, one man thought Wave was like a wiki, one man thought...

In retrospect, maybe Google should have said, "look, we can't describe it with words. Please watch this 1-minute video and you'll understand." ;-)

I was one of those people. Really, I didn’t understand what Wave was trying to do. I tried to use it with my friends but all I saw was nested text boxes. Can you please tell me what it was trying to do?

I had exactly the same experience. I was at university, and around 20% of students on my course had access to Wave, which functionally meant 0% of students could use it.

“An app to collaborate on, but nobody to collaborate with” has to be the most economically destructive product rollout I’ve ever seen.

Kinda a reason why I'm unlikely to sign up for anything that needs an invite, has a wait list, etc. Every day I see "Ask HN" posts about how hard it is to get traction with users, that somebody who has traction is going to use it to dick people around is the baddest of all bad smells.

the invites for wave was just a lame attempt to bank on the success of Gmail... they thought the invites was the reason, not 1gb instead of 10mb elsewhere.

google would really be awesome if PMs/VPs weren't so clueless and powerful.

I'll say it as I always do. One time I threw together a "blurred version of your text is shown as you type, becomes clear when you hit enter" and it was some of the nicest instant-messaging I've ever had with another person. Blur was the trick, to give a sense of the length and activity, but not the message.

I am a person who loves building and testing new interaction models. When you do this as a team, you end up climbing away from the main local maxima and building a new one. However, you get so used to living in that new local maxima and thinking about how great it is, you forget how to onboard people to it.

With a new interaction model, it often matters more to build the path to get people there, not the new local maxima itself (unless you're going to get kids to adopt it first, but Wave was definitely not targeted at them).

The Wave "onboarding" experience definitely should have had more demo videos, had features that turned on or were discoverable slowly, or had sandbox rooms where you could try it out with basic bots. It's a major missed opportunity that Google didn't do this; it feels to me like Google didn't have an internal playtesting or dogfooding culture where they intentionally left some people out so they could be fresh. I wrote about how to build this culture here: https://dustinfreeman.org/blog/playtest-rituals/

It was overcomplicated, but arguably it paved the way for Slack.

It was too early.

The UI was slow due to the browser not being able to handle it. A new Wave with top performance on phones would have a chance of becoming a thing.

They built a product that needed a bandwagon effect, rationed how many people could join the bandwagon, and then complained that not enough people were on it.

> their biggest failure was simply not continuing development

Wave was a technology demonstration that eventually became Google Docs collaborative editing.

In my books, that's a major success.

Yeah the wave codebase is a bit of a poster child for me of how the enterprise Java programming style can easily drown you. I think we opensourced ~350k lines of Java and it honestly doesn’t do anywhere near enough to justify its weight.

I feel like you could rewrite the whole thing today in about 1/20th as many lines using modern tools & frameworks.

Thanks for trying to keep it alive. That was a tough thing to do!

What was your experience with the Wave code base?

It was magical at the time. But the collaborative everywhere and multimedia was particularly nice.

Now you get that in Figma, Linear, and others but it's still a feat.

Looking forward for Patchwork to come out and see if it can generate that magical feat again: https://www.inkandswitch.com/project/patchwork/