Lessons From Google Wave: Even If You Build It, They Might Not Come

Last week Facebook announced that it will expand its messaging service to provide conversation history, integration with IM, email, SMS, and Facebook messages, and social inbox that can filter messages by your social network. When I brought this up to my friends, one friend immediately chimed in and said he's seen these functionalities from Google Wave. I haven't been keeping up with Google Wave. I vaguely remembered hearing about Google Wave is about to shutdown as standalone project in coming weeks.



What went wrong with Google Wave? Why did Google Wave fail to establish critical user base?

Collaboration Tool Without Collaborators;
Building Critical User Base Requires Clear Use Case

There are many blog articles discussing what Google should have and could have done to avoid this failure. Let me list several reasons here:

- It was too complex to understand for average users
- "Live-typing" was annoying at best, confusing at worst
- No one knew what problem Google Wave solved; The use cases weren't clear
- Lack of promotion
- Feature scope was too ambitious
- Lack of product focus
- UI complexity
- Lack of federation with other collaboration tools
- Too slow iteration due to opensource community
- Prone to excessive spamming
- Applications affect initial load time
- Invitation only strategy slowed down adoption rate
- The tool didn't explain itself well enough
- The barriers to entry were just too high

These are all valid reasons. After refreshing my memory on why I stopped using Google Wave -- I didn't even realize I test drove Wave last year, but I did -- I can see how these reasons could have contributed to end of life to Google Wave. These are all technical reasons that Google engineering team is fully capable of solving. Take a look at how quickly Google Chrome became mainstream.

I think all these failures to execute product definition, study user experience, iterate fast to harness user feedback, and putting marketing horsepower behind Google Wave point to one thing: Lack of executive focus. Google Wave was never the focus for Google. I cannot help but draw parallel with Orkut, another project that never really received Google executives' attention.

I have no doubt that if Google had focused on Google Wave, it would have made it successful. But Google's bottom line is not generated by building the world's best collaboration and communication tool. Their bottom line is driving on-line and mobile ads. Google Wave had always been an afterthought for Google.

But this is all about to change. Facebook has been rapidly closing in on Google in all aspects of internet measurements. Recently Facebook has logged 1 out of 4 Internet page views, which makes Facebook the most visited website on Internet period. Google is now realizing that Facebook is about to eat their lunch AND dinner. Facebook messaging is significant because of Facebook's growing threat to Google.

All signs are pointing to Google answering Facebook with their own social network. There are many posts on Quora that suggest its launch is just around the corner. We will soon see whether Google learned their lessons from Google Wave.


Sources:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/software-service/why-google-wave-failed-too-complicated-no-fun-979
http://lifehacker.com/5605686/on-google-wave-and-failed-experiments
http://techhaze.com/2010/08/r-i-p-google-wave/
http://www.slate.com/id/2264930/pagenum/all/#p2
http://www.rioleo.org/dissecting-why-google-wave-failed.php
http://www.1011ltd.com/web/blog/post/why_wave_failed
http://www.bloggodown.com/2010/02/reasons-why-google-wave-failed.html