Posthumous Retrospective on Google Wave

By beaching Google Wave little more than a year after heralding the engineering leadership of Lars and Jens Rasmussen at the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009, Google now sets the high water mark for the familiar rapid prototyping mantra fail early, fail often.

What's to be learned from the demise of Google Wave?

What is the Google ethos? The Google ethos, lifted from my post Lessons From the Google Rocket, is

• Have the audacity to be different
• Maintain a healthy distrust for suits
• Let data be indicators that trump notions
• Release early and learn

One demonstrably productive prejudice that pervades Google group-think is

Stuff gets invented by engineers, not hucksters or charlatans.

Google values the engineering method. To an admirable fault, Google pursues an engineering-centric path. Introducing Google Wave inventors Lars and Jens Rasmussen to the Google I/O audience, Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra extols the Rasmussen brothers' engineering chops, gushing about the Rasmussens' previous triumph, Google Maps.

Few companies do more than Google to feed the engineering pig. Google are legendary in engineering circles.

Usability Gets Short Shrift

Unfortunately, product usability at Google gets short shrift. Usability of Google products is often relegated to lipstick on a pig. Google is remiss in dismissing interaction design - usability - as lipstick.

As one who occasionally muses about burning his TV remote in a flaming, ball of confusion effigy, I believe

Usability is as fundamental to any product as any whizz-bang functionality

Google Wave was an engineering triumph - a creative mash-up of tried and tested technologies like XMPP and established web concepts like Wiki. However, usability was never improved. User experience was never demonstrably considered by Google. Most users just didn't get it.

Perhaps the engineering tent at Google needs to include interaction designers. Why not?

Google could even refer to these insightful creative-types as "usability engineers". Heck, the folks at Cooper, some of the most talented interaction designers on this hairball, are only 30 miles up the road from the brain trust ensconced at the Googleplex.

As cyber buddy Ergun Çoruh says in RIP Google Wave:

Google Wave was too stressful to use.

What Worked...

At the Google Wave Developer Preview held at Google I/O 2009, Google VP Vic Gundotra said, "Frankly we need developers to help us develop this product". The strategy to release a half-baked concept to the open source community is laudable. The ink wasn't dry on the Federation spec when eager developers attended the Google Wave Hack-a-thon in June 2009. Developers were jazzed to get in the ground floor building. Bullish on the potential uses for Google Wave, I wrote Google Wave and Collaborative Projects and Will Google Wave Overtake Microsoft Groove?. With the advent Story Board for Google Wave, I was hopeful that the Agile community finally had a software tool that helped rather than hindered.

Half-Baked Product

What Didn't Work...

For execution metaphors & ease of operation, Google Wave was the TV Remote of collaborative software. It was a pinball waste-land of bells & whistles. Many of the operational metaphors that make things easy for users to understand were never explored or realized for Google Wave. Why did Microsoft Bob, an epic product failure, last longer than Google Wave? Perhaps because it used the familiar metaphor of a house with rooms. Google Wave vs. Google Maps: Google Wave was bereft of metaphors to guide skittish users. One reason Google Maps is wildly successful for inventors Lars and Jens Rasmussen is because online maps have a direct and familiar analog on paper. The Rasmussen brothers didn't enjoy the same advantage with Google Wave.

Half-Baked Product

Google will bake the lessons-learned into future forays into social networking and collaborative apps. Perhaps we'll see user experience improvements in Google's upcoming Facebook-killer Google Me?