It was sadly ahead of its time and was probably pitched to the wrong audience from the start. Rather than trying to explain why Wave is better than email and chat to the internet at large, they probably should have pitched it as a business productivity tool. Oh, well. Hindsight is 20/20.
As great as wave was, it didn't work very well either.
It was open sourced as Apache Wave. Yes, it was gwt.
I wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.
Google only have failed engineers turned product manager. they live and die by some random metrics. the gmail PM would never accept anything there that reduced time spent (or some other random, disconnected from reality, success metric) by a second!
We began project specs in ‘instant messaging ‘ type mode, and then back and fleshed out that conversation, editing the original posts to become full fledged documents. It was seamless.
Browser performance was a dog, bug I’m sure that could have been worked on.
Loved the ecosystem of apps and bots that was developing
I think if it really was so great others would have copied it and made great clones. Given that that never happened it would seem that others were never motivated enough to build a clone, which tells me that it was never useful enough.
I would be happy to be proven wrong about what a great tool it was, but in the end it seemed like more of a cool tech-demo than anything great.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks
Ray Ozzie’s Groove was remarkable for distributed teams in the mid-2000s; I’d argue not yet replicated.
They were way too early to market. Supposedly their compensation is or was structured to reward shipping new products/features to an extreme degree. I wonder how things might have turned out if they "shipped" it internally first, and iterated on it a few more times before putting it in the hands of the public.
We are building a collaborative productivity tool at Taskade (https://taskade.com), in part inspired by Google Wave. Would love to get your thoughts!
At work we use Slack, Email, Google Docs, etc. We’re never quite happy with how things work - what should be email vs Slack, at what point should a a Slack conversation become an email conversation to be visible to more people, when should that turn into a doc for a more formal review process, etc. We’re trialling Notion for some things and it’s good. What should be a Wiki?
Whenever we have any of these discussions, I always feel like we’re circling around what Wave once was, and potentially could have been. It wasn’t fully polished, but so many of the fundamental concepts were there. If it had stuck I think communication in companies would be much better than it is now.