Google Wave had quite an effect on how I react to 'cool, new tech things'. I was very excited about it and convinced friends to try it out, but then in practice it just didn't 'click'.

Ever since I've been paying a lot more attention to the somewhat indefinable 'feel' of a tool. Trello, for example, felt right despite its relative simplicity (or because of it?), so I felt like it had a bigger chance of working out.

If I had to define it, I guess it would be something in the direction of what someone in an early React presentation described as the 'pit of success'. Using the tool feels like it was optimized for how 'you' use it, and I suppose if everyone feels that way, it's got a chance of succeeding.

tl;dr: 'apart from the clunky UX' is probably a bad sign.

On the other hand for me, Trello is something I use now and then because some team I'm working with uses it for a workflow. But it's never really clicked for me and isn't something I use unless I have to.

Sure, but do you use something else? It's simply incredible how low-quality most "card apps" are (Jira leading the pack with awful UX/UI).

No. Any "to do"/workflow apps I use, I go into with the best of intentions and I get out of the habit after a while. For on deck articles and other content I need to or am thinking about creating, upcoming conferences I may submit to or attend, etc. I mostly just use a Google Sheet with tabs for the various categories. And I mostly just use paper lists and a whiteboard for tracking both someday/maybe projects as well as stuff to get done this week.

I mostly don't do software development except for the occasional learning project.

Incidentally, "pit of success" is usually the goal in the standardization discussions for new web APIs. The anti-goal is a "footgun," which makes it too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

> I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave.

I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.

Interesting, do you have a link?

I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.

Here it is: https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209

Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."

I know it's easy for me to say in hindsight, but I think that as the CEO Eric Schmidt's big failure with Wave wasn't "I should have cancelled it sooner" but "I should have encouraged a better, more focused product".

I don't know.. I'm trying to think of a product that was fundamentally broken in v1 that was eventually "fixed" by exec encouragement/buyin/investment and ended up succeeding. Maybe Internet Explorer. Yea, I suppose Microsoft is the master of this "v1=shit, v2=shit, v3=barely usable, v4=world dominating" approach.

How about the iPhone? (No copy/paste, no apps, no 3G, etc)

Apple usually mail the core experience with v1, but all the ancillary roles have to wait till v3 or v4.

Thanks. Sounds like management by metrics instead of vision.

And if that's your metric, then why slow-roll the launch by making it invite only? If the answer is performance, like I suspect it may be, then why launch if you cannot achieve success by the sole metric you appear to be looking at?

I don't think so. If you'd asked Wave's designers before the launch, their vision surely would have included increasing usage. It turns out few people cared about Wave.

Schmidt's decision has been borne out by events. Did Wave take off when open sourced? No. Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Also no.

I agree to a point but I want to see numbers leading to reasoning. If you identify why the numbers are bad and it is not something you can or want to turn around then sure, kill it. Killing off projects based only numbers alone is tyranny of the bean-counters.

> Did Wave take off when open sourced?

Eh, how many "dump and run" open-source projects take off? Bringing an opensource community to life is its own brutally hard problem.

The numbers were bad, Duncan, because not many people wanted to use it. Your theory that they are "killing off projects based only numbers" is something you appear to have made up.

I think Google's real error was not killing it too soon, but allowing it to be developed in a bubble and then springing it on the world with a giant, "Ta da!" It let them ignore a lot of real-world problems and questions, investing heavily in untested design hypotheses. Once you get to the point of a huge global launch, you've baked in problems in a way that is very hard to fix.

Isn't Slack Wave-like?

Previously asked and answered. No, slack is IRC-like. The Wave approach also mixed in notions of emails, wikis, and group editing.

> Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market?

Slack.

Trello.

Slack is basically a spiffed-up IRC. Trello is a virtual index card board. Neither is, "designed to merge key features of communications media such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking."

> has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech?

Schmidt was CEO from 2001 to 2011. During that time period, Google basically invented all the infrastructure we take for granted in distributed systems today, popularized the concepts of JavaScript-heavy web applications and Software as a Service, created from scratch a new browser (Chrome) and a new operating system (Android) which promptly dominated the market, and became one of the top five largest companies in the world.

I think he deserves some credit, yeah.

Chrome wasn't created from scratch, it was WebKit-based (which Apple didn't start from scratch either, it was KHTML-based). This not to deprecate Google, but to give some credit to the open-source projects they based their work on.

Fair enough, "from scratch" was a stretch. (And Android was Linux-based, etc.)

It's not just "Android was Linux-based", it was bought by Google in its current form as well.

No... it was bought by Google in a very primitive form, years before even its initial release. Android at the time of acquisition would be mostly unrecognizable today.

I don't think it's fair to say: "They only bought it so it doesn't count." You could just as easily say: "They only hired Paul Buchheit, he was the one who came up with GMail, not Google." Real inventions aren't spontaneous point events, they take many years of development, and can die anywhere along the way if you don't continuously create the necessary environment to foster them.

He certainly has business achievements but I'm not sure how much these count as invention as I mean it. The type of invention I have in mind is where novelty is a significant obstacle i.e. it requires education and transformation in the expectations and behaviour of the audience not just solving technical problems. In this type of invention, you have to swim upstream against the numbers holding on to a vision to break through.

- Chrome - competitive play - iterative improvements over competitors

- Android - competitive play - purchased, playing catch-up to competitors

- Infrastructure - internal services

Basically, is he is more Xerox Copier division than Xerox Parc?

Obviously Eric wasn't creating the inventions himself, but I would argue that he fostered innovation very effectively in the way he ran the company. Eric hired amazing people and put them into an environment where bottom-up innovation could happen, and then he stood back and let it happen. It was chaotic, but a lot of great stuff came out of it.

OTOH, when Larry took over, things became much more top-down, with Larry trying to be Steve Jobs and tell the company what they should be building next -- most notably when it came to Google+.

I left before Sundar took over so I don't know how he runs things, but it seems like Google these days is just sort of chugging along, building solid products but not doing anything revolutionary.

You use the term innovation which I avoided because it typically only means "bring to market" instead of invention which I see as novel work to traverse a wilderness of unknowns. He views his mistake not as identifying a fault in the vision or the implementation but in not responding to numbers soon enough which I find telling. You can't lose sight of the shore to discover new worlds if you require positive numbers at every step.

The Larry approach sounds more vision-led and its interesting how it looks when it fails. Its difficult to see beyond the survivorship bias and only see it as egotistical and ignorant failure.

I think we disagree on the meaning of innovation. I don't like the term "invention" because it suggest a point event rather than a continuous process. I don't think "innovation" means "bring to market"; they are two separate phases in a process.

The real mistake with Wave was that a group of incredibly smart engineers were basically allowed to go into a bubble and build whatever they wanted for an extended period of time. Successful innovation needs to be anchored by a real problem to solve. E.g. the best programming frameworks always come from someone who is building a real app on top, not from someone who set out to build a programming framework. The feedback loop is necessary to keep developers focused on the actual needs of users, rather than on whatever problem they find most interesting to solve.

I think Eric is referencing the poor usage numbers as a proxy for the fact that the Wave team was not building something that users really wanted.

(FWIW my own startup, Sandstorm.io, had a pretty poor record on this point as well.)

Google wave pretty much provided infrastructure for Google docs and other realtime communication products.

Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.

> Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.

Making it even more ridiculous that they killed off Google Reader for it (or didn't bother to revive it afterwards)

EDIT: Also, they already had Picasa Web Albums since 2006. I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.

Especially with Flickr stagnating at the hands of Yahoo, Google more or less had the market for a high-quality photo sharing site to itself had it wanted it.

That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.

It’s interesting you are thinking of them as the high-quality niche, saying not a huge demand for full resolution.

Problem wasn’t full resolution, it was re-compressing your originals. Photographers that care about full res, care about original quality.

While there were (and still are) options like SmugMug for photogs, Flickr was the only prosumer one supporting unlimited original quality.

Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much?

Turns out photographers who posted and curated 50,000 photos are not big fans of having the rug pulled out from under them by people in marketing trying to change the UI for their own engagement metrics.

>Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much

I actually think that's somewhat fair. I could come up with some things that I wish were better with Flickr and there are probably lots of things I'm not thinking of. But I still use it and, in conjunction with Lightroom, I find it's a pretty good way to display a curated collection of edited photographs (as well as serving as a backup of last resort).

I did object to the big UI change a few years ago and still don't really love it. On the other hand, I don't actually use the web interface much. I upload from Lightroom and I mostly view from a tablet.

> I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.

The machine learning assisted search. For example, if I want to find photos of whiteboards that I took to record a meeting, I type in "whiteboard".

Also automatic curated photos, reminders and so on. A mobile app that is very simple and easy to use.

And automatic sharing suggestions based on the people that was at an event.

I thought writely gave them that?

Docs pretty much threw out all the Writely code and switched over to a new editor built from scratch (codename "Kix") in 2010. I'm not sure if Kix used code from Wave, though.

I'm pretty sure there is no lineage from Wave to Kix (which, yes, was the code name for the modern incarnation of Docs). Kix is more of a descendant of the architecture of Google Sheets.

Source: I am one of the original authors of Writely, did not work on Kix but I was still at Google when it was being written, had a minor role in reviewing the design.

Out of curiousity: with these full rewrites, do they at least learn from the mistakes of the previous code? I can imagine there is potentially great value in that.

Good question. I don't know how much of that was done in this case. I can say that at the outset of the Kix project, they did ask me for advice about pitfalls. (I was skeptical that it could be done at all using the browser technology of that time; they proved me wrong. One of my concerns was proper handling of complex international character sets, both for input and rendering.)

Kix is a drastically different architecture than Writely, so many lessons would not have been applicable. Writely was built on a contentEditable DIV, so the data model was literally whatever junky HTML the browser's contentEditable implementation would create, and synchronization was implemented by performing three-way diffs on the HTML code. It was very much a dancing bear, in the sense of "the amazing thing is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all". ...but I digress. My point is that the mechanisms and challenges of that approach are entirely different than the Kix approach. I think the important lessons would have been product-level rather than code-level.

I dunno, the description you just gave of a dancing bear gives me the impression that your advice must have contained quite a bit of insight about past mistakes to avoid.

If Trix is Sheets and Kix is Docs, what does the K stand for?

I have no idea. :)

Hmmm, best I can come up with is a joke about cereal.

What about the OT code and the comments?

Bear in mind that this was almost a decade ago, and I wasn't directly involved. With that caveat: the core mechanisms for client / server coordination in Kix were a direct descendant from Trix (short for "Matrix"), which was the original code name for Google Sheets. And Kix was developed by a team in New York, an offshoot of the Trix team which was also in New York. Writely (post-acquisition) was in Mountain View, and Wave was in Australia (I forget which city), and the picture that might give you of how closely the various teams communicated is probably accurate.

I don't know whether Trix originally used OT specifically, or the Kix team borrowed that idea from Wave. But the basic idea of clients performing small, tidy logical operations and then synchronizing them in realtime through a server was part of both Trix and Kix. Writely used a very different (and more primitive) approach.

I don't know anything about the origin of the comments feature, but my guess is that there was no connection to Wave, except (again) possibly a bit of inspiration. The Wave team was very separate, both geographically and organizationally, and the tech stack they built was very disconnected from anything that was going on with Trix, Kix, or Writely.

Wave was in Sydney, the only Google engineering office in Australia. I walked through their space before they had even announced the project internally. All that almost everyone in the company knew was that Lars and co. were busy on something big. The rest of the office was aware of its nature, but sworn to secrecy until the announcement. I remember going by a whiteboard, looking at this architecture diagram (wavelets?) and still having little clue on what it was all about, other than it having something to do with threads. :-)

I was asking because I have a vague recollection that Kix borrowed OT ideas or even code from Wave. But then I was even more removed from both teams than you. Or maybe it was just an aspirational thing from management to find a silver lining in the Wave shutdown.

You might be right about the OT idea, or even some code, having been borrowed from Wave. I wouldn't necessarily have known about it (or I might simply have forgotten). But I'm pretty certain that Kix as an overall project was much more closely connected to Trix than to Wave.

I agree. I liked it back in the day, and the fact that you could attach people to subtrees of a conversation was rather cool. IT also fixes infinitely-deep email chain problem very well.

It reminded me of usenet in that respect, easy to ignore subtrees you don't care about.

What surprised me was Wave is obviously best for business, where email chains CC'd to a load of people who don't care are the norm, yet they killed it only months after enabling it for Google Apps

A group of friends excitedly signed up for wave and never found out how it was better at anything than a Google doc and it's built in chat.

We spend a lot of time just figuring out what we wanted to communicate about inside wave and settled on planning a trip abroad, and eventually migrated to docs.

What seemed to sink Wave as that Google dropped their support for a federated internet.

Keep in mind that Wave backbone was XMPP, the same XMPP that powered Google Talk, and could in theory allow any number of Wave instances around the world to talk to each other.