Aug 6, 2010 | Dissecting Why Google Wave Failed

Of the many Google products out there, Wave is perhaps the odd one for having failed miserably despite all the initial hype. (I think Orkut is the notable similarity, though it's adoption in Brazil and India have made it largely worthwhile to maintain). It was intended to be the "be and all and end all" of online communication, a mixture of email, instant messaging and collaboration. And yet it clearly didn't receive the type of adoption rates Google had hoped for - in the end, all it seemed like was an easy way to get lost. And being lost is such an easy way to take the fizz out of the fun of multi-faceted communication. With the benefit of hindsight, I've tried to dissect some of the reasonings as to why it may have turned out to be less that it was supposed to be:

It was too ambitious
Wave hoped to accomplish too many things at once, but sometimes the Swiss Army knife approach is too difficult to embrace. The reasoning behind why there are so many different IM clients is that adoption is based largely on who else is using it. When I was in Brazil, everyone was using ICQ. In France, Windows (MSN) Messenger was the way to go. A while ago, AIM was the de facto means of messaging in the US, though as I've grown, many of my peers have migrated to Google Chat. If no one you know is on Google Wave, it already loses appeal, despite the fact that it can do much more.

It was too complicated
Google Wave's attempt at being the panacea meant it had to deconstruct the traditional email/IM paradigm, two the most familiar elements of web-based communication. To that end, Google's accomplishments with Gmail and GChat/Google Talk are by no means trivial, but it's worth noting that changes to our understanding of email (like threaded email conversations) have come gradually. Google Wave used nomenclature differentiating between waves, wavelets and blips, for example, which just added to the confusion.

There weren't many uses for it
There wasn't any one thing that Google Wave did that could not have been accomplished by more traditional means. If there was a need to communicate with someone else, Google Chat did the job perfectly, providing simultaneous access to one's current email inbox. If online collaboration was needed, there was Google docs, also with chatting integrated. It would have been very hard to scrub the perception that Google Wave just wanted to collapse everything together without any particular benefit (see caveat below).

There were too many new features
Admittedly, Google Wave's greatest innovation was in the nifty technology it contained. Drag-and-drop functionality, character-by-character live typing, historical replay, embedding of multimedia and wiki functionality are all fabulous tools to have, but knowing that they existed and not having the opportunity to use them made the product feel even more obsolete.

They rushed it
In the end, it almost seems too easy to ascribe Wave's failures to a feeling that some of Google's products lately seem very rushed (an obvious example being Google Buzz). At least with Buzz, user adoption is almost guaranteed because of its embedded nature. Google Wave's fragility suggests that Google's control over user adoption of new technology is not that powerful once it's let loose outside of Gmail and Google search. Wave is likely to be shelved as another of those projects that Google employees used, loved, adopted, and advocated. It's just so hard to predict how well that translates outside the confines of the Googleplex.

Also written on this day..

• 2005: Heya
• 2003: A Final Goodbye