[acdha]

> Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do.

That's somewhat true for certain technical aspects but it's too quick to ignore the mistakes Google made and minimize the value of work which more successful products put into the user experience.

Google never made the case for why using Wave would benefit you; as with Buzz, Plus, etc. Googlers reported liking it because they had both critical mass and pressure to use it long enough to see the benefits but few people outside did.

Instead, what we did hear about a lot was the technology which was going to change the world right up until it failed. This is a common failure mode for Google where the strong engineering culture crowds out UX, forgetting that for almost any product that's an implementation detail which most people shouldn't need to care about.