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 Barely on the market a year and suddenly withdrawn by Google, it begs two questions.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.

Tim Hampson posted an interesting snippet on our own executive collaboration portal about his new iPad and travelling through SFO.

A former colleague has a favorite story he likes to tell from his IBM days. I think most people have heard of the phrase ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’, even though today you might more likely substitute Microsoft or Google. In fact, people did get fired for buying IBM and it’s instructive to understand why. The particular example the ex-IBMer relates to happened in early 90’s and involved a large enterprise company that decided to pilot what was then a new product for IBM called Office/2. Running on the equally ill-fated OS/2, Office/2 was a groupware product broadly comparable to Lotus Notes or MS Exchange today.

With some considerable confidence, the customer decided that to trial its first ever use of client server groupware, they would choose the executive management team. The trial did not go well and to add insult to injury, IBM Office/2 was ‘withdrawn from marketing’ – a delightful phrase synonymous with ‘canned’. Removed of any possible way to fix the problems or move forward now, the hapless customer project manager in fact found himself ‘withdrawn from employment’, and in frustration even physically assaulted the IBM Systems Engineer.

All companies have their ‘Edsel’ moments. Successful companies are the ones that recognize their mistakes quickly and move on. Typically this means rationalizing product lines. Getting out of markets can be as important as getting into markets. In fact, product lines do not even have to be unsuccessful in the market’s eyes. They can be very successful, but if they fail to make a profitable contribution, or are otherwise deemed non-strategic, they can be axed at the drop of a press release.

In these circumstances, customers have little, if any leverage. It’s unrealistic to think you can change the course of industry titans like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP or Google. The chances of any of these companies going belly up, is of course, rather slim (but still finite), but if they axe a product line upon which you depend for some reason, then the impact is the same.

Conversely, smaller companies are typically focused around a single product. The risk of company failure is clearly higher, but equally clearly in my mind is the additional security a customer enjoys by virtue of the fact that the vendor is 100% focused on their market, and are of a size that the customer really does have leverage over them.

I’m not saying don’t buy IBM or any other industry giant, but I am saying that many of the oft-quoted concerns about smaller vendors are overblown. Having worked for both large companies and small companies, I just don’t see small companies as being inherently riskier for customers. Size really doesn’t matter.

UPDATE September 30th, 2010

Interesting article that covers Microsoft’s exit from the blogging software space and advising customers they have just six months to migrate off, and notes a number of other cancelled projects. Even buying from Microsoft is no guarantee of longevity.