Google's product graveyard is littered with both bad and good ideas. Some did not succeed because the execution was bad, others were simply released unfinished or too early.
Google Wave is probably the greatest example of this and I was one of the first to believe in it back in 2009, but just three years later Wave died despite doing so much right.
Integrate chat, documents, and email into one canvas in real time.
We take collaboration on online documents for granted these days, but when Wave allowed people to type, edit, embed, and dynamically work together in one live space, it felt like the future had arrived.
Of course, Google Docs had been around for years at this point, but we were still used to the cyclical email chain for making decisions or getting things done on team projects. Wave has blurred the line between document creation tools and messaging apps.
It's funny because Canvas functionality is found in apps like Weak Today is essentially what Google Wave did in 2009. I admit that Wave was rough around the edges, making it difficult for us to understand what a “wave” was and how best to use it, but people quickly found useful things they could do together. I had just started working in a psychology department at a large university in the second year of Wave, and we were very excited about the possibilities of both teamwork between staff and how we could use this for teaching.
Live character collaborations years before it became the norm.
Google Docs was launched in 2006 after Google bought Writelyand here you could see what other people were doing with the document as they worked. However, at that time it was not exactly “real time”, but updated every few seconds. Something like an autosave interval when everything is synchronized.
Wave, on the other hand, used a very cool technology called Operational Transformation (OT). InfoQ interview, 2009 with Google software engineer Dhanji Prasanna. This is what allowed you to see exactly what everyone else was doing in Wave, without noticeable delay. It also solved the difficult problem of preventing conflicts when multiple people edit the same file.
Today, this expertise is used in Google's productivity suite and virtually every other web collaboration platform. Now we just take it for granted that any online document is inherently multi-user.
Integrated extensions and bots that automate communication.
Wave was designed so that you can use it, customize it, and adapt it to the needs of your team or organization. This meant built-in gadgets, bots, automation, surveys, maps, and more. We see this today in apps like Slack, with bots, apps, and integrations. You can also easily add third-party extensions to tools like Google Docs with a few clicks of a button.
Although it was quite chaotic at first, Wave was one of the first examples of such integration and flexibility.
A federated open protocol designed to replace email.
If Wave were just a fancy collaboration tool, it wouldn't be so prominent, but Google had much bigger plans for it. Wave was an open protocol, and Google's vision included federated servers managed by third-party hosts. Can you imagine Google allowing its services to work this way today?
The idea was that the Wave protocol could replace email with a modern, rich communication and collaboration system. However, to date nothing has come close to replacing email, and I suspect we will still be using email millions of years after we do. turned into crabs.
However, the idea of ​​federated services is still alive today. We had decentralized applications and, of course, services such as Mastodon And bluesky also use a federated hosting model.
Concepts that failed in 2009 but define productivity today
I've used Google Wave for almost its entire life and understand why it failed. It wasn't entirely undeserved. The UI was terrible, dense and nothing like Google Docs or Drive Today. When I tried to get my colleagues to join me on Wave, they often just gave up. They didn't understand the concept and I even had to provide training!
Also, don't forget that back then, “broadband” was so slow that today you'd think your Internet was broken, and real-time collaboration was scary and new. It definitely caused some information overload, like trying to work in a noisy boardroom.
Even though Wave collapsed (ha!), its DNA clearly lives on in the software we all use today – real-time collaboration, unified communications, extensibility, shared workspaces – they're just regular software features now. This is why we can work remotely and projects can be planned and completed quickly and efficiently. Fast internet connections, powerful computers and, yes, even the latest advances in AI automation have made the Wave idea a reality, minus email. It will be the same forever.
