Why Google Wave failed?

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About a year ago, I already saw (somewhat) the demise of Google Wave. It was much more evident when they rolled out Google Buzz (splitting user attention).



So yesterday, Google announced they will stop development of Google Wave:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. 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. {via}

This is just over a year of developing a real-time communications tool that many touted as the replacement to email. Or so they thought.

So what was the problem with Google Wave? Well, it was too damn fast busy and in “real-time” that it requires a lot of your attention. It’s like moderating a dozen Yahoo! chatrooms all at the same time. It was also slow (so unlike GMail that’s lean and mean).

Google Wave was also an ambitious endeavor — it wanted to replace your Email Inbox. But email, despite its shortcomings, is still very pervasive and hard to shake off for many. Then they had Google Buzz, a trimmed-down version of Google Wave. Buzz may have significantly driven attention away from Wave.



Still, Google is proud of Wave and what they’ve done with it:

“We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new. – Google CEO Eric Schmidt“