Google has announced it is ending development on Wave, the cross-platform communication tool it launched with much fanfare at its I/O developer conference in May 2009.
Google said in a post last night that "Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked" and that elements of Wave's technology, including drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are now as open source so users can "liberate their content from Wave".
Like most people, you've probably heard of it but not actually tried it, which sums up the problem. What was it? The Wave idea was a centralised communications tool that combined the real-time advantages of Twitter with the aggregation of your email and chat, with collaborative documents too. Easy to dismiss as something too ambitious and far reaching, but perhaps the difficulty in describing its function was its biggest downall. Twitter managed to survive a similar fate (remember that moment of trying to describe it to a non believer?) but Wave was far more ambitious.
There will be plenty of coverage today reeling off lists of Google's failures; Google Squared, Google Answers, Google Radio, Google Lively, Google Health, Google Notebook and Dodgeball among them. Those will be reliably dwarfed by Google's successes. Our European perspective might make us more critical of failure than in the US, where it is more rightly regarded as an inevitable and positive sign of productivity and innovation.
Chief executive Eric Schmidt himself said of the Wave failure that it is just a symptom of trying things out. "Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it's absolutely OK to try something that's very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that," he told journalists late yesterday.
Co-founder Sergey Brin was convinced to support the Wave concept by a Google development team in Australia. "When they came and proposed this idea they said, 'We want to do something new and revolutionary, but we're not even going to tell you what it is. And we want to go back to Australia, hire a bunch of people and just work on it.' ," Brintold the Guardian shortly after Wave's launch. "That was a crazy proposal. But, having seen their success with Maps, I felt that it actually was pretty reasonable."
When Wave launched at I/O, some developers were waving their laptops in the air. It was a moment.
I'd file this under ideas that were just a little ahead of their time. With refinement, a clearer proposition and better integration with existing services, it would have stood a better chance. Wave was one stab at tackling our information overload, at providing a central hub for all the information we need to deal with every day. And it will be back, in one form or another.
