Google Waves Goodbye To Email Killer

In surely what must be the biggest gift to headline writers for years, Google has decided to bid a fond farewell to its Wave collaboration platform, citing a lack of uptake as the reason.

In a blog post this week, the search giant admitted that Wave hadn’t lived up to the hype generated on its release. When the application was first debuted in May 2009, the engineers behind it touted it as a new form of collaboration but consumers and businesses haven’t been so enthusiastic.

Lack of User Adoption

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” said Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of Operations and Google Fellow. “We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

Despite the failure of Wave to find a user base, the company maintains that it supports the engineering team behind it and the innovations they will develop in the future. “Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science,” said Hölzle. “We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

Wave was developed by the Google team behind the company’s ubiquitous maps application. Speaking in May 2009, Lars Rasmussen, a software engineering manager at Google said his brother Jens convinced him that the future of communication should be the next concept for the team to conquer after maps.

Google acquired the company Lars and Jens co-founded, Where 2 Tech, back in 2004. And after launching and watching the success of Google Maps, the team, which Lars referred to as a “five-person startup”, began work on Jens’ idea in a project they codenamed “Walkabout.”

Walkabout led to Google Wave, which the company demonstrated in a preview version for developers at Google I/O. In Lars’ words, “A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

Google claims that some of the developments Wave spawned will continue to live on. “The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began,” added Hölzle. “In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.”

70:20:10 Engineers

Although failure of Wave to catch-on will be a disappointment to the company, Google has a history of taking a punt on new products and applications which are not guaranteed to succeed. Indeed, the company splits its engineers’ time according to a 70:20:10 ratio with the bulk of their time spent on core products, 20 percent on new ideas related to core products and 10 percent on high risk ventures of their own design.

Speaking to eWEEK last year, Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler postulated that Google was being quite ambitious in its plans to steer users away from email and into real-time collaboration. “I would say that this next step for Google Wave is an important step in its development,” Schadler said. “But if it fails to catch on like wildfire, that doesn’t mean that the ideas or the application is wrong; it might just mean that the magic formula to turn people away from email hasn’t been found just yet.

eWEEK’s Darryl K Taft contributed to this report