In a blog announcement posted on August 4, Google announced they were pulling the plug on their Wave platform. Lauded by Ray Schroeder, among many other educational technologists, as a potential competitor for learning management systems, Wave suffered from what many start-up projects suffer from: lack of wide user adaptation.
When it first came out, Google helped create their own publicity machine by sending out special invitations to try Wave. But not just anybody could join; indeed, these invitations became as coveted as finding a golden ticket to tour Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
There was one problem: no one quite knew what to do with it when it arrived. Not helping matters was that users who wanted to see what made it “tick” had to watch an hour-long streaming video just to get an overview. I’m personally more of a manual-reader while doing something on the computer, and those of us in that camp had to rely on various resources on the web, including one which had as its first words: “Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand.” They featured a link to a tongue-in-cheek online poll comparing Wave to other things to see which was easier to understand. (In one such poll, “The Geopolitical Climate in Southeast Asia” was voted as easier to understand than Wave by a vote of 62% by 38%. One of my personal favorites is the one that said the Swedish Chef from the Muppets was easier to understand than Wave by a vote of 73% to 27%.) Plus, you had to get others who were also on Wave to join your Wave to see its full effectiveness. So you not only had to understand it yourself–you had to hope others did, too.
Somewhat surprisingly for those of us who thought Google was invincible, ZDNet listed a few other Google failures in its own story announcing its demise, though I personally couldn’t recall them. But this one was different: this one had a potential application in higher education. Perhaps that was part of the reason for its demise. To win in the tech world, you’d better have a good business model and that means being able to apply it to….well, the business world. (Apple’s success notwithstanding.)
Unfortunately, any future Google endeavors that promise to change the world may well be met with a much larger dose of skepticism, whether deservedly or not.
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