"Wave" Goodbye

Sometimes I wish I could start a website called "I told you so." It would be where people could go to post predictions, opinions, evaluations, etc., and then, when they proved to be right, they could cite the date on which they first called it, and say, "See, I told you so!"

In this case, the subject is Google's Wave, and the date was June 4, 2010.

I wrote (in this column): "When it first launched, I was a beta user of Google's Wave.

Funny thing, I never really used it! I'm not sure why, but I suspect I just didn't "get" it.

Part of the problem, if indeed "problem" it is, is that a Wave is so many things - IM, email, document, discussion. It's hard to know what your point of entry is."

On Wednesday of this week (August 2, 2010), OnlineMediaDaily wrote, "Say 'So long' to Google Wave. The search giant said Wednesday that it plans to stop developing the much-hyped collaboration tool as a standalone product, and its site will likely be shut down next year. Yes, despite having "numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Urs H"lzle, SVP of operations at Google, wrote in a company blog post Wednesday. 

"Unmentioned in the official product obituary: Google's impatience," remarks Gawker. "Google Wave was released to the world just this past May, barely two months ago. A fundamentally new communication system like Wave is useless without a large base of users, so Google really should have given the product more than 77 days to catch on." Still, "Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked," writes The New York Times' Bits blog. Indeed, "The service was deemed too complicated by many users, with an explanatory video lasting more than an hour," notes the Financial Times. "Earlier this year Google had said it planned to simplify the service, but this failed to boost uptake."

The truth is, most products that are successful are successful because they solve a problem. Some products may, indeed, solve a problem we don't know we have until the product is created - like, cell phones, for example. I'm not sure a lot of people went running around wishing they could be on their phones anytime, anywhere. But once the phones came online, the benefit - and the problems they solved - were immediately obvious. Safety when traveling; keeping an "eye" on the kids; letting people know when you'll arrive without having to stop; not needing a quarter for the pay phone - or even having to hunt a working one down.

But with Google Wave, people were neither clamoring for it, nor did they see the obvious benefit when they first tried it out.

As I always do, I tried to find a use, and I wrote: "And there are far more sophisticated uses for Waves (than the Christmas gift collaboration I suggested), such as getting a far-flung work team together to brainstorm, or even share the writing of a document. There are task lists which can be shared with your team - and remember, you can link a series of Waves together so that a project's shared discussions can all share a common reference point."

I concluded that I was willing to give Wave another look. But the truth is, I didn't do it. 

And as the OnlineMedia writer pointed out, you really have to have a "large base of users" to make the application useful.

See? I told ya.