How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave

Re:How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave by duncanawoods on Sunday February 18, 2018 @06:46AM (#16405597)

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.

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Re:How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave by kentonv on Sunday February 18, 2018 @07:43PM (#16409908)

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.)

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