Ganesh Harinath

The product heralded by no one outside of Google as being any good, Google Wave, is going to shut their doors at the end of the year. What was a terrific case study in the workings of artificial demand is now a terrific case study in what can go wrong when a platform tries to be everything to everyone, without the everyone part.

It was a simpler time when Google Wave launched late in September of 2009. No, not really, but it sounds good. The world was pretty similar to how it is now, and the timeliness of the product made sense. Twitter was catching on, YouTube was becoming a core product in the Google ‘takeovereverything’ strategy, and everywhere people screamed from the deepest darkest corners of the intertubez for real-time technology.

I can personally recall feeling a smug sense of self-satisfaction when I received my invite to join the service in late 2009. I was the envy of all my friends and colleagues as I logged in and began networking. But about 45 seconds in, I stopped. There was no one to talk to, the GUI was ridiculous and the attention to UX was practically non-existent. There are enough reviews of the product itself, and the defects are widely known now, so I don’t need to get into too much detail here. Needless to say, it wasn’t so much ahead of its time as it was just too much to take in at one time.

End result? I logged in to Google Wave fewer than 5 times total during the lifetime of my account. I’m willing to bet I wasn’t the only one… Real time typing? Collaboration? Rethinking email? Awesome concepts, not so great implementation. And that pretty much sums up the product.

On the Google Blog, they’ve stated as follows:” The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily ‘liberate’ their content from Wave.”

In typical fashion, Google has attempted to be the ‘nice guy’ and continue providing the open source service. At least that is something we can all agree [or mostly agree] is a good thing.

What’s next for Google? Speculation has already called for the new product, Google Me, to be all the rage. Let’s see if Google can get it right this time.

I hope I get an invite.