You might remember a few months ago that there was rather a lot of fuss and hype about one of Google's latest products - its real-time communications application, Wave. You probably also remember feeling slightly confused about what it actually did, and how you could benefit from it, and for that reason Google has decided, after just five months, to cease development on Wave - which is somewhat of a shame I feel, but must admit that I also reckon Google probably made the right call on it.
The reason for Wave's failure is simple - user adoption was far too slow due to the tool being perhaps too versatile, and therefore tricky to market effectively. All in all, it's probably a very healthy sign that a company as big as Google, which can afford to carry a few failing products for quite a while before finances dictate that it must be dropped, is making decisions as incisively as this. Others would surely have been a little more reluctant to write of all the work and investment that had gone into such an ambitious project, especially at a big company which can afford to persist with a slightly underachieving product for months if not years.
Therefore, kudos to Google for pushing ahead with Wave in the first place - it was truly an exciting product (the hype around its launch was genuine - it really promised a lot), but one which clearly needs reconfiguring drastically before user adoption will meet the high standards that Google requires to continue with projects. It remains to be seen whether any potential Wave rivals or replacements might spring up to fill the void and have a crack at (inventing?) the aggregated real-time communications market.
The problem for any such alternative projects will be that Google was in an ideal position to develop such a product - and still failed. Any rival would need to also command massive user trust with data (to sync all our various web based communications through one portal is somewhat of a security risk hypothetically speaking), and also to already be a facilitator of much of that web-based communication (which Google is by virtue of gmail, docs, talk, blogger etc). Few can match Google in terms of being suited to developing a Wave-like product.
Nonetheless, with the massive proliferation of communication technologies online one can't help but feel that some degree of greater synchronization is just around the corner - it's just a case of how it will come about. Perhaps it will be a matter of one larger company (Google, Microsoft etc) acquiring enough smaller ones (Twitter, Slideshare, Flickr for example) that aggregation will then become inevitable. Or perhaps social networks such as Facebook will eventually triumph in becoming the portals through which all our communications as conducted. Facebook's increasing penetration across the web surely suggests that such a thing might be possible (basically, imagine logging into FB when you're online and then being already automatically logged into all FB-compatible sites and programs such as Spotify, Twitter etc etc).
Anyway back to the here and now - Google Wave is done and dusted for now after (what I would consider) a fairly bold and ambitious experiment over the past year (since Wave was announced in May 2009). However, I'd be very surprised if the conceptual aspect of Wave didn't come back sooner rather than later - either from Google or indeed many of the web other major communications players.
Dejan Levi
