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.)