Why Google Wave's demise was inevitable

Few web services have attracted as much buzz and hype as Wave, Google's answer to the inevitable question, “what would email look like if it were invented today?” Email as a platform has existed, pretty much in its present form, since the late 70s, and as such far predates the world wide web and the notion of the internet as a social medium.

In the months that followed its unveiling at Google's I/O conference in 2009, the eagerness of many to get their hands on the product suggested that Wave stood a good chance of actually taking on email as a primary means of online communication.

Google Wave's messages, known individually as Waves, are collaborative documents to which multiple users can be added and removed at any time. Waves implement numerous real-time sharing and collaboration capabilities, seamlessly integrating aspects of wikis, social networks and instant messaging. But the application still behaves ostensibly like a traditional email application.

But regardless of what it can do, Google has said from the outset that Wave is what you make it – whether you use the service no differently to how you traditionally send and receive emails, or whether you go to town with rich-media and real-time updates.

The developer preview opened as soon as the product was announced, and the invite-only beta commenced in November 2009. However, reception was lukewarm, uptake was poor, and usage never came close to exceeding expectations. And in early August, Google announced that it was to pull the plug for good in the not-so-distant future. So what went wrong?

Integrate, don't replace

When mobile phones first entered the market, they revolutionised voice communication. Suddenly phonecalls were not confined to a two-metre radius of a telephone socket. But there was never any question as to whether one could use a mobile phone to call a traditional landline. They were always going to be backward compatible.

In June 2009, it was estimated that there were 1.67 billion internet users worldwide, and it's a safe bet that of this number, the majority are email users. But inexplicably, Google Wave offered no backward compatibility, no way of sending Waves to the poor people stuck in the dark ages of email. There was also no way of emailing @googlewave.com addresses, even though to most people, these look no different to email addresses.

Wave users were left with two ugly options: convince all of their friends and colleagues to switch to Wave, or use Wave and plain old email concurrently. Of course there was a third option that doesn't really bear mentioning: ignore everyone not hip enough to embrace Wave. And I don't doubt that some hardcore Google fanatics opted to go down this route.

At the very least, sending an email to a Wave account might have triggered some kind of compatibility mode, eschewing all of the fancy real-time features, and allowing users of the two platforms to intercommunicate.

A hastily-written feature, tacked on a few months after beta launch, allowed users to opt-in to email notifications when Waves were updated. Too little, too late?

Accept the web's limitations

While we have the power to emulate real-time technology online, we have to accept that the web is not a real-time medium. Google, however, tried to push the boundaries a little too much. If two people are editing a Wave simultaneously, each person will see the other person's update as they type it, letter by letter. A neat trick, which unfortunately came at the cost of sacrificing performance. And this was one of many contributing factors to Wave’s sluggishness. Even at the best of times, Google Wave was slow and unresponsive to the point of being unusable.

Don’t be arrogant

I touched earlier on why Google Wave could not possibly have replaced email. But this raises a final important question: what possessed Google to think this was the correct intention? Why couldn’t they have simply dubbed it “an innovative communication platform”, leaving the public to decide whether it would surpass email? Google could then have spared themselves a lot of embarrassment when email remained dominant.

It’s very common for even the most cutting-edge technology companies release products that flop. It’s very common even for Google to do so – think Google X, Web Accelerator, and perhaps soon Google Buzz – but Wave’s huge potential has made its failure particularly resonant.

All things considered, I’m sure Google won’t be losing any sleep over Wave’s failure, being conceived by the very team behind Google Maps. It’s possible they will be suffering from dented egos and be a few pennies out of pocket, but Google’s huge successes in the search market aren’t exactly overshadowed by what many will consider a minor blip on their project history.