Whatever happened to Google’s Wave? Barely on the market a year and suddenly withdrawn by Google, it begs two questions.

1. Why did the world’s biggest and baddest Internet player, with the biggest and baddest engineering team (the guys that came up with Google Maps) fail so miserably?

2. Is there anything in this wreckage that could be salvaged?

My take-aways on the first point are as follows:

Value proposition. Wave was supposed to be an email replacement but nobody seemed to be able to articulate why exactly it was better and under what circumstances. I confess to never “getting it”, so it was somewhat reassuring that no one else did either. The analyst community, who sang Wave’s praises until recently, seems somewhat lost here. My take? Wave was too unstructured – letting people see what you type as you type might look cool in a demo, but it can be severely career-limiting if your boss is on the other end. If I know one thing about collaboration it’s that process is key. Wave was the opposite.

Performance – or the lack thereof. I’m not sure if this was architecture, Google’s addiction to perpetual betas, or simply them not putting enough oomph behind it. Still, while it’s not often discussed by vendors, performance is hyper-critical for product adoption. No one wants to wait around for a screen to paint. Rest assured at BoardVantage (and it’s one reason we’re not cheap) that we deliver a performance level commensurate with business critical systems.

Integration – or the lack thereof. If you can’t get your content in or out the system, whatever magic happens inside the box is irrelevant. In this context, the fact that Wave integrated with neither Gmail or Googledocs is particularly puzzling.

The second question is harder to answer. It’s easy to poke fun at giants when they trip up, but there is a lot to be said for maintaining context in any collaborative environment – a central feature of a “wave”. At BoardVantage we’ve taken a somewhat different approach with our “discussions” which are integrated both with email as well as the document repository, even to the level of recognizing which versions were relevant at a particular time. Perhaps not as hype-worthy, but similar in philosophy, and one I believe will match more corporate use cases, where you need broad access but without sacrificing process.

PS

I can’t finish this post without a nod to Joe’s article “Size Doesn’t Matter”. If Google can so unceremoniously discontinue Wave, it’s safe to say that company size and product market profile are no guarantees of longevity. Caveat emptor.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 AM and is filed under Industry Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.