[com2kid]

> Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010.

IIRC wasn't it only "doomed" because it was such a resource hog people could barely use it? From what I remember the people who could get it working loved it.

> Loop components, “atomic units of productivity”

OLE! But for the web! Seriously anyone else remember when OLE was a thing and you could drop a print shop pro banner in Word, click it, and print shop pro toolbars would appear? (I think it was print shop pro, if not some similar bit of software, its been 25 years so my memory isn't perfect on this exact point!)

> Google Wave was clearly ahead of its time.

So were the million other attempts to do this over the years, but hopefully the experience will get incrementally better with each go at it our industry tries.

This is how progress happens, one step at a time. Learn from the past and make brand new mistakes that the next team gets to learn from.

[spicybright]

It was also doomed because of Google's terrible invite system.

The few of my friends that got in early couldn't do anything because there were so few others, and everyone else just forgot about it months later after the hype died down.

No idea why they keep doing this.

[com2kid]

It worked for Gmail, but Gmail was so far ahead of everything else at the time that people really wanted in.

Limited invites can create buzz, Facebook did it well by inviting entire universities at once, that got around the problem of "no one else you know is on it."

Inviting purely random people to a collaborative system? Eh, not such a good idea!

[slowmovintarget]

It was doomed because you couldn't mix gmail and waves. That meant any real conversations couldn't be had. Waves ended up being just horsing around with your colleagues.

"This is neat!"

"Yeah!"

"Wave!"

"That was cool."

"Yeah."

"K. Bye."

[jsilence]

Yes, I do remember OLE. My colleague and I were looking forward to CORBA which was promising to do similar things in a standardized way cross platform AFAIR. Did not gain traction.

[qwertox]

The nice thing about OLE was that it was a relatively clean standard. You could use ActiveX in the browser and had multiple ways of creating them, but all those ways were focused on the programming language, rather than on frameworks.

Nowadays you have Webpack and React and Node and all that stuff where you rarely get to be coding but most of the time you're spending at managing all those tools.

[qwertox]

I was into Google Wave robots development at that time and I had trouble seeing how this could scale. There was a ton of data sent to developer's App Engine instance for every edit in a conversation.

It also was a privacy nightmare. IMO it was just a test from Google to see how reliably this would work, I doubt they had the intention to let it run as a product.

But I really loved it.

[navane]

I still use it at work, mathcad embeded in word... :(

[com2kid]

Eh, it was a cool idea. Way ahead of its time, like a ton of 90s MS technology.

Hell they tried remote RPC stuff and what, 30 years later protobufs comes along and everyone declare's Google's library to be LOL amazing.

TBF I've used both COM and protobufs (in the same team!!!) and and protobufs was 100x easier to work with.

But still, some of the those old ideas of MS were really good, just IMHO they were limited by the languages of the time. Programming in raw C or 90s C++ was hard enough as is, trying to add entire new technologies on top of that, eh, not nice.

And of course back then all software releases were big bang versions every 3 or 4 years and you to support all previous versions basically forever, so yeah, difficult limitations to create new technologies under.

Lots of good lessons to be learned though!