Google Waves Goodbye to Product After Only One Year

Only a year ago Google were getting their PR machine in a frenzy ahead of the launch of Wave, a product they ambitiously announced would replace email and transform the way people communicate. Today, they cut a dejected figure waving goodbye to a product that never really got off the ground.

However, it wouldn’t be fair to declare the product as a complete failure and we could yet see reincarnations of it.

Not the End of Wave?

The concept of Wave was to create a single hub where people could instant message, email and share documents in real-time. Its functionality was smooth and inspired instantaneous communication.

Alas, take-up was slow and even many Google veterans were non-plus about its merits. As such, one year on, Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President at Google declared that “Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked.”

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, remained positive about what was learnt from the Wave experiment. He said:

“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.”

He also went on to suggest that the lessons learnt with Wave would be applied to future products - probably products in the social sphere - although he wouldn’t be drawn on the nature of these.

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