Google Wave Halted: Five Lessons Learned

Google has decided to put a hold on development of its service Google Wave. It made the announcement last Wednesday, recognizing that the service never reached its anticipated success. For those who didn’t experience the frenzy in spring 2009, Google Wave was the service that, according to some, was supposed to replace email. The hold is not permanent. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, explained that the company “celebrate[s] our failures.” Here is what one can at least learn from Google Wave.

1. Invitations too frustrating

Google Wave’s launch became a fiasco. The Australian teams in charge of the product attempted to replicate Gmail’s 2004 viral launch, which had been extremely successful, by giving out invitations. This decision was meant to allow the teams to manage the increase in membership.

It was a double error. There were too many invitations (some were even sold on eBay), which increased membership tenfold. And yet, the product was not really ready, for in order for Google Wave to be interesting, it was necessary to rebuild one’s contact list. In that respect, Gmail was but a new email service that worked with all contacts, which were with Hotmail, Caramail (R.I.P.) and other providers.

2. Google really did try

Google “is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new,” Schmidt also said. This is a key statement. Wave is not Google’s only failed project. The company launches products in beta and puts them in the hands of users, to wait and see what the users give them. Lively, the virtual world put online in the Second Life frenzy, and the Nexus One are two other products that used the same method.

This method is unique in the sector, nothing like Apple, which polishes each one of its products to the extreme, hides its developments and perceives every terminated project as a tragedy (ah, the Cube!). Nor is it like Microsoft, which shows its prototypes to appease its engineers (the Courier tablet) but does nothing concrete. Abandoning Wave is no big deal. It’s just part of how Google works.

3. Google Wave remained incomplete

It only takes a few seconds to make a first impression. With an Internet service, it’s no different. And in that respect, Google Wave is totally stuck.

Google Wave never demonstrated its real potential, if not but in a few niche uses. It was conceived by Google engineers as a site for Google engineers. What’s worse, even the geeks, who tend to be early adopters, were disconcerted after their first contact with this contraption, which attempted to be a mix of email and social networking in the name of collaborative work. A parody site (http://easiertounderstandthanwave.com/) explains.

Launched too soon, Google Wave suffered from not having known to send a clear message on what it knew best, seeming to want to do everything at once. Previously, it explained on its welcome page that it allowed one “to do things with groups of people,” a hook that really piqued interest.

4. Google Wave was not the “death of” anything

Google Wave had been exaggeratedly presented as the successor to email by the press and by blogs. Fond of new developments and rivalries, they bear part of the responsibility for Google Wave’s failure. But the teams at Google weren’t overflowing with modesty either in their launch descriptions of the product.

In the end, Google Wave killed nothing, just as Facebook didn’t kill Twitter when it offered new features, just as Nexus One didn’t kill the iPhone in revolutionizing the distribution in mobile telephones. Talking about the “death of” something only creates misrepresentations and misunderstanding of the point of the service.

5. Google was ahead

Google promised in its funeral announcement on Google Wave that the advances made with Google Wave were not in vain. They will be integrated into other Google products, starting with Gmail. The union of messaging and collaboration, starting with real time, built up with extensions, gives a good idea of the future of social networks. The result was rather elegant for a Google product.

While its ambitions onscreen are self-affirming, and even if it has a hard time with being social, one could think poorly of Google for dropping the project. “The world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing,” Schmidt said, referencing Facebook. In revenge, one could easily use the positive aspects of Wave in the sort of social networking site that the world really needs.