I realise that this isn’t as current as it could be but I’ve been discussing this on various forums lately and it seems that the majority of people believe Google were right when they announced, a few weeks ago, that they would be discontinuing their ground-breaking Wave service citing a lack of demand. By this post’s title you have rightly surmised that I don’t agree.
I still find the whole thing quite odd. I remember, when they announced it last summer, there was an enormously positive reaction to the idea and Google Wave videos went viral as people flooded to get their invites, myself included. When the invites finally came the lucky early recipients began selling them on eBay, many for ridiculous amounts of money. Meanwhile Google had to start staggering out the invites more and more, as the servers got swamped with early adopters.
Google had extremely high hopes for Wave, the brainchild of the same team behind Google Maps, with the lofty ambition that Wave would be a replacement for email, instant messaging, forums, Twitter, social networks the lot, by combining the best aspects of them all into one, real-time collaborative platform where everything takes place entirely within the browser.
Now, little over a year after they announced it, the entire Wave project is set to be scrapped.
Many in the press, particularly the technology press, have been quick to dub Wave as “another failure by Google”, which I personally find somewhat hard to swallow. Firstly, it wasn’t a failure, it done pretty much exactly what it set out to do.
Sure, there were issues with Wave; the inevitable bugs and niggles which one is bound to run up against whilst trying to get an all-in-the-browser application to function across multiple platforms and over multiple networks. Both Google’s Gmail and Docs had similar teething problems at the start, and still do from time to time, though I’d hardly call those failures either.
The only other criticism that came up regularly in comments was that, because Wave tried to do so many things at once, it wasn’t quite as intuitive as it could have been. Sure, I’ll concede that Google could have done a bit more to plane down the learning curve a little, though clearly lots of organisations, like those in the virtual assistant business, such as myself, or similar industries such as project managers or professional freelancers, were happy to take the time to learn.
Some might see Wave and see nothing new in it, “it’s just another instant messenger” they might say, others might consider it unnecessary, because email already does the job, they don’t want the proverbial Swiss Army knife with the scissors, they just want the simple scissors. Of course many people expressed similar sentiments when email was beginning to go mainstream, “it’d be done much faster if I just pick up the phone.”
In my experience people are, on the whole, quicker to adopt new technology if they see it as a direct benefit and are generally sceptical until proven otherwise. Also, the more hype that surrounds a new technology or service, the more sceptical they’re likely to be. This is only human nature.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that this sort of scepticism surrounded the Internet, in some areas it already does, social networking being a prime example of this. Until social networks become well and truly bound to e-commerce (which is rapidly becoming a reality) they’ll be filed under W for “way too busy and don’t have time to learn how to use this”.
With Facebook alone exceeding the 500 million user mark earlier this year that attitude is now also changing quite quickly.
It took fifteen years, or thereabouts, for people to really see the value of the Internet for their business. Even longer still, from the beginnings of the Internet, back in the ’60s, for it to become the much-hyped “Information Superhighway” of the mid ’90s. Email too, had its beginnings back in the ’60s where it was mainly the domain of large corporations or academic institutions. Even as the PC market began to bloom in the late ’70s and early 80s, offices still favoured sending messages by fax or the now forgotten Telex machine. Let’s not forget, either, the cellular phone, another child of the 60s. By the beginning of the 90s only the very smarmiest of yuppies could afford one and in those days if you had a pager you were considered cool and important.
So, though the technology has been around, more or less, for about 40 to 50 years it’s really only 15 years ago that these three methods of communication finally became mainstream. Why? Well firstly because technological advancements have allowed for faster and more reliable communication, but secondly because it takes time for new communications mediums to catch on as people gradually come around to the idea. Until eventually they inevitably come to wonder how they ever could have managed without them.
To me, that’s the biggest argument as to why Google shouldn’t pull the plug on Wave, they need to wait before people start to adopt it in great numbers. And, since the technology really isn’t the issue this time, they don’t need to wait for as long as email did.
So what now?
Because Google has such a strong corporate culture that encourages its workers to work on pet projects on company time, one can forgive them for thinking the entire world is just one huge buzzing global hive of geeks creating and collaborating across continents. One can understand, too, their motivations in the reversal when they realised that the whole world wasn’t going to suddenly stop using email. Though I’ll bet Google workers will continue using Wave themselves to collaborate on projects and although Google intend to yank Wave completely by the end of the year somehow I don’t think we’ve seen the last of it.
Many believe Google will recycle aspects of the service into new or existing products, perhaps infusing it into Docs and Gmail – something which I’m sure many would welcome, not just myself. In fact, just this week Google threw down the gauntlet to Skype by integrating Google Voice functionality directly into Gmail allowing users to make free or cheap calls directly from their browsers. One now wonders what’s next for Gmail and what other cloud applications will be integrated into it in the months to come?
The other possibility is that someone else will take the idea and run with it, or integrate similar functionality into existing productivity software or project management suites. As industries such as mine continue to grow and as freelance workers and home workers grow in acceptance, demand for such tools is bound to rise. Likewise with more and more people working and collaborating across borders and so many IT companies, not just Google, vigorously promoting the cloud computing model it’s not hard to imagine a new generation of collaborative tools designed for specific industries. Examples might be specific solutions for the scientific community, or for specific freelance industries such as graphic design or document creation.
It was Wave’s real-time collaborative functionality, after all, that was its best selling point something which I think Google were quick to realise; the idea of being able to collaborate and brainstorm in multiple ways at multiple points in time, and to do so entirely from a single browser window, is far from dead.
One way or another, Google Wave will be back!
