Summary : Google announced the end of Wave last week. Beyond the logical deception of those who adopted it and believed in it, many lessons can be learned from this project, most of all about the almost systematic failure of communications tools that don’t integrate with business contexts and processes. Anyway, maybe the deep nature of Wave was to be a software layer instead of a standalone product.

Google announced Wave was dead last week. According to their words :

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Since any downside has its upside, let’s try to find what can be learned from this adventure :

1°) Too good too early ?

Maybe Google was too early. That’s, in fact what Michael Arrington suggests and that’s surely a part of the explaination. That’s neither the first nor the last time such things happen and what happened to Apple in the late 80s/ early 90s should remind us that it can heppen to any company, that it may be harmful, but that it’s possible to recover from it.

2°) An half-cooked product

That’s the impression Wave made in the first times after its launching. Of course, it was continuously improved but it was too late to get the first deceived users back because they had other concerns than testing “one more tool” waiting for it to become usable. The worse thing in this story being that these users were supposed to be the power ones who should have lead the adoption. Fail.

On the other hand, Wave has been a very instructive experience because it demonstrates the limits of a powerful and rich stream : its lack of usability. I’m sure that many vendors that had similar things in project learned the lesson. We’ll discuss that in an upcoming post.

3°) Wrong positionning

Albeit powerful and rich, Wave was not, like Google Apps, Gmail and many other services, something anyone can master and understand quickly. To some extent it was rather an enterprise application, even if it doesn’t mean this positionning would have made things easier. Anyway, it was more a collaboration tool than a communication tool. On the web people communicate because they want and happen to collaborate by luck, in the workplace they collaborate by need and that may have made it easier to find the right early adoptions there.

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