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> But there's no reason for Google to throw good money after bad That's the thing—they haven't thrown any money at the problem at all. The whole problem is that it was a half-hearted effort from the start; Google didn't put Wave anywhere visible, they didn't integrate it with Gmail or Google Talk, or do anything else to get traction. They just sort of put it out there and hoped people would subscribe. That's how products work, but Wave isn't a product, it's a technology—and you have to sell a technology, company by company, until it's in use in a sufficiently large user-base that it becomes self-sustaining. Imagine if the concept of "electronic mail" was invented today. You couldn't pull that off as a startup; you'd have to be Google-sized to even get off the ground. Now, what Google could have done, would be to go to Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and whoever else that has any product or service that's vaguely message-/chat-oriented, and offer to help them rebuild that product/service on top of Wave. Wave Facebook walls, Wave MSN, Wave Flickr, etc. Just making one crappy AJAX client is exactly not the winning strategy. |
I don't think it'd be all that different from launching the concept of microblogging or social networks. Startups did fine with that.
What Google should have done, having a technology on their hands and not a product, was make their other products either built on Wave or compatible with Wave (Docs, Chat, Mail - using Wave. Calendar, Pages integrated via robots, etc).
Then, you'd have a huge built-in user base that can ignore the complexity until they grok it and if they want it. And all their data will be waiting for them.
In the meantime, Google could develop and throw robots into their products as features. Being able to directly send messages to a robot for publishing on your blog platform of choice, or directly drag attachments to a robot that populates Dropbox/Flickr/whatever? Being able to add a plugin to schedule a party into an email chain that automatically updates Google Calendar? Having a service that detects tracking numbers and provides mouse-over summaries?
Even for users who would never want a Wave-like client, those features would make Google's existing products better and stickier. And none of it would involve burying every would-be user in complexity on day 1.