We are curious how Google Wave will re-emerge in Google’s various product offerings. Most of its components will go open-source so we will see it in all sorts of various forms out in the wild.
But there is a question about Google’s timing. It’s an enterprise collaboration service that had gained some acceptance in the market. For a stretch earlier this year we saw a number of companies adopting the Wave protocol.
Still, the level of frustration about the service is palpable. It’s almost as if Google realized the Wave environment could not scale. Following that thread, it’s conceivable that over time distrust about the service would be insurmountable.
What do you think? Did Google Wave suffer a premature death?
The Novell Pulse group collaborated with the Google Wave team. We asked the group if it felt Google had killed Google Wave too early, and Andy Fox, VP of engineering, said he was not surprised it pulled the plug.
“Without knowing Google’s internal success metrics, we can’t comment on the timing of pulling the plug on Wave, but are not surprised they did so. Why? Because consumers don’t have a burning need to collaborate with co-editing, and the largely single-purpose product didn’t address enterprise users’ needs. Any product that seeks to make it easier for people in the workplace to collaborate has to give those business consumers what they need and at the same time meet the IT departments’ concerns about security and compliance. We feel that many ideas Google helped pioneer in Wave have important applications users will love, including: character-for-character real-time document authoring; interactive, in-message gadgets; drag-and-drop between the desktop and the browser; and federation to enable inter-organizational editable documents. We will continue these ideas in Novell Pulse but have always felt that a collaboration platform needs more than just these features. We hear from our customers that they need a solution that brings together real-time technology with document co-editing, file management, social connections, rich profiles, and the ability to create groups and communities; this is where Novell is focused. Wave touched on only one piece.”
We’ll move on to other topics after this post. We promise. 🙂 It just feels like a significant inflection point in the market. Google Apps has its flaws. Dropping Google Wave illustrated that point even more.
