The Demise of Google Wave - A Lesson to learn

With much fan following and hype, it was during last year's Google I/O conference in May 2009 that Google had launched the beta of very ambitious project - "Google Wave". Around 15 months down the line, Google declared that it is pulling the plug on its development and finally shutting down the site by the year end. Google Wave was designed to be a brand new way of collaboration between people. A way that would combine the elements of Emails and Instant Messaging. Google built it on an open protocol and allowed custom clients to interact with a "Wave". Google enabled communities to enhance Wave by building extensions and also by building their own Wave applications. Many developers built some innovative pieces of software using Wave. E.g. SAP labs built a prototype of collaborative Process modeler using Google Wave technology. So what went wrong?


The internet is already flooded with blogs and tweets around the reasons of the demise of Wave. From the perspective of Product Management, looks like it attempted to solve a user problem that did not exist. Google had explained the birth of Wave in the thought that emails were invented 3 decades back and with the advancements in the technology and internet, if someone had to design a collaboration tool, how would that look like? Google's answer was "Wave". It had this ambition to replace emails one day. The problems of email communication that it attempted to solve by state-of-the-art technology were not perceived as major problems by the very users of emails. It had many cool features but that however came at a cost. The whole notion of combining emails and IM into one "Wave", character-by-character real time chat, Wave playback, etc all were very cool features. It however needed all your users to be on Google Wave. That was a huge cost to pay. I tried its beta. I struggled to get my regular buddies onto it. I gave up eventually. If it had worked out a way to allow communications to existing email users, that would have solved this issue to a larger extend. The returns on the effort to get your buddies onto Wave were not good enough, primarily because it had a lot of "cool" element to it, but limited value perceived by its target user persona. The problems with emails it tried to solve, did not possibly exist in the eyes of the users.


Lesson: State of the art technology, buzz, hype, et al does not help succeed a product unless it addresses specific user problems in such a way that user perceives value in shifting from the current solution to use the new product.

Another example of product that is highly engineered, but low on perceived value. Surprisingly, from Google.