by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: August 08, 2010

Google has announced that it is discontinuing development on Wave, the product that when launched in 2009 was supposed to revolutionise how people communicated online. A combination of instant messaging software and email was partnered with clever features that allowed users to collaborate on shared documents, all in real-time, with updates appearing from other Wavers as they were typed, character by character.

The brainchild of Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the brothers behind the phenomenally popular Google Maps, a poor take-up of users (or members) was the main reason why development on Wave has been halted. Apparently they will continue to support the site for another year, and the software behind Wave will be ploughed into other project development initiatives.

Google is fairly sanguine about the failure of Wave. Their CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently said during a speech at Techonomy: "It's a very clever product. You never know why it didn't work... Our policy is we try things. Remember we celebrate our failure. This is a company where it is okay to try something that is very hard and not have it be successful."

At a time when social networking and wiki-editing are all the rage across the Internet, it seems almost inconceivable that a Google-backed project of this nature could fail, and many are unsure as to why Wave failed to find enough adopters to make it a viable platform.

One suggestion has been that it was a bit too clever for its own good, a potentially powerful specialist design and planning tool (version control becomes a problem of the past if everyone is working on a document stored on a network that shows changes in real-time to all users) that was being marketed at the mainstream market who really only want to send amusing pictures of cats to each other. This is probably a bit of an elitist web developer's reaction, however.

Equally, as with Google's Gmail, sign-up to Wave was initially limited to invitation only, with each new member of Wave receiving a limited number of invitations. In marketing terms, this sort of strategy is supposed to give the product added value and build desire among consumers, but there is a strong feeling that there were just not enough invitations to satisfy the early demand - and by the time everyone who had been interested had managed to beg, steal or borrow an invitation... the initial buzz had faded.

A rather more concrete reason behind Wave's stalling is that on its initial release, the platform was not compatible with Internet Explorer, requiring users to install a plug-in which Microsoft initially refused to endorse as secure. With IE still the largest internet browser in terms of market share, particularly among the crucial mainstream users Google were hoping to attract with Wave's full launch, this could well have damaged Wave's initial impact, weakening the product at that crucial launch stage. With Google's own Chrome browser growing in popularity, it could be that Wave was just an idea that came along too soon for its own good.

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