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Google Wave washes out: communications TOO unified?
Google Wave, introduced last year as a new unification of e-mail, chat, document sharing and other forms of electronic collaboration, will no longer be supported by Google, the company announced. Google says that user adoption never reached the levels the company hoped for, and that many Google Wave features are now or will soon be available within other solutions. Did Google try to do too much too early? Did Google mishandle the Google Wave roll-out? Or is Google Wave an example of a unified communications solution in search of a meaningful problem?
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3 Answers
Lots of good questions here, Michael, and there should be more dialog around this. The fact there isn't any happening here is probably a good indication that Google Wave isn't getting the uptake we thought might occur. I would agree, it's probably TOO unified for most people to get their heads around. For well-schooled Google users, I'm sure the benefits are obvious, for the rest of us, it will still take some time to associate Google with this level of business communications integration.
Voice is very central to any UC solutions, and it's still a missing link for Google. I'm sure that will change soon once they figure out how to leverage their acquisition of GIPS - Global IP Solutions. Also, with all the talk about Skype's planned IPO, the pressure will be on Google to step things up. Skype has big plans for the business market, and they remain the gold standard for Web-based voice service.
Michael,
I think the problem was that it was not clear how Google Wave would replace any of the technologies that people already do using different -- but more stable -- tools.
A part of it was that we got access to a product that was far buggier than anything Google had released to the public up to that point. It didn't scale well, it was kludgy, and it was slow.
But, probably the greatest sin was that it solved problems that no-one outside of Google actually had! Do I really want to juggle a dozen people chatting simultaneously in different parts of an app, and passing files back and forth? Do we want to have to get all new email addresses to deal with this?
It was a closed network that required everyone to change the way they operate today, without any clear benefit of why the new was is better ***in practice***
It looked cool -- at least in the demos -- but it lacked the practicability factor. It didn't help that you had to wait a bazillion years to get an account, and that there were all sorts of fun security implications that Google didn't even talk about or acknowledge.
I'm sure they've learned some valuable lessons and will integrate much of the technology in stages across their other applications, but it also highlights a Google weakness: They're good at incremental feature deployment, but not so good at product introductions -- particularly with large, robust products.
You can see this with Chrome, Android and even Google Apps.
This is going to be a problem for them, if they hope to compete against Microsoft, Skype and others in the Enterprise market, where organizations expect solid product rollouts...
-ASB: http://xeesm.com/AndrewBaker
Wave didn't work for one simple reason.. mobile.
Wave isn't dead yet.... it still needs checkins, Google Places and gasp.. FaceBook integration.. (already had twitter and youtube.) Hopefully the final release of wave will be more like digsby.. a twitter/IM client with lots of connected information on people in your google network.. add Google profile integration with more info and with blogger as extended microblogging using a format like tumblr or amplify..
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