Google recently announced that they will no longer be developing the Google Wave platform – citing poor user uptake and lack of clarity around what it does. Why did Google Wave fail, and what does it mean for collaboration? Rich Cowtan investigates.

Death throws

So why exactly did Wave fail?  There are those who slate the entire platform, thinking that it was unnecessary and sought to unify several already efficient technologies – email, instant messaging, wikis and document writing to name but a few. Personally, I think that the concept was an excellent one. Each of the afore mentioned technologies all operate well, but collaboration is an after thought – how do we collaborate when we’re writing a document? Google Wave sought to turn that on its head, and ask first and foremost  - how do we collaborate? The result was an entirely logical stream of consciousness that part resembled a document, part wiki, part web page which allowed the easy addition of others to work alongside the original creator. It had some pretty cool features like being able to see people typing in real time and dragging and dropping files from the desktop.  So if the concept was a good one, what killed the application?

I’ll highlight two possible reasons;

Firstly, very few people saw the need for the application as a whole – features yes, concept yes, but in reality – changing the way someone interacts with key work place tools was always going to be a hard sell. Was it supposed to replace working with a word processor, instant messenger or email? The fact was that it couldn’t even if you wanted it to – people wouldn’t view all their emails through the tool, or wouldn’t work on all documents through it. A better bet from Google would have been to say it should replace all those tools – and make it so people COULD replace them.

Secondly, given my first reason, I think there has been a massive failure to plan and manage the change that this technology may have brought. Lofty aims are often hard to reach, and getting a team of people, let alone company, let alone whole world of internet users to adopt new working practices requires more than a few YouTube videos and a few blog posts. For Google this amounts to a whole heap of marketing, and for organisations who were keen, a thorough change management programme should have been instigated. Google should have helped take us from vision to implementation – by helping us understand the need, helping us migrate from the old way to the new way and by facilitating organisations interested in completely usurping existing tools and ways of working towards a wholly more collaborative future.

As is, we’ll have to make do with seeing bits of Wave pop up in other technologies, and at some point lament the fact that we can’t have a handy single platform that brings best bits of email, wiki, instant messaging (etc) in one place.

Death of Collaboration?

Death no, but it does set it back (a bit).

Most of our clients at WTG have yet to embrace collaboration. In some ways, Wave made waters already muddy a lot murkier, and to have a bit more clarity isn’t a bad thing. Our clients would ask – how should we collaborate? Should we share documents, should we use the cloud, and just what is Wave anyway? For most then, thinking in ‘old school’ terms of ‘document first, collaboration second’, makes  life a lot easier.  Create something, send it to your collaboration space, then collaborate. What the bits of Wave left over will allow is some nifty user interface tweaks which make life easier.  What Google Wave’s demise does do is postpone the nirvana of proper online collaboration for the enterprise a while longer.  When we advise on collaboration, we talk in terms of ensuring conversations, thoughts, research is all completed online.  For the brave organisation, why not go a step further, work in the cloud on documents, spreadsheets and other ‘core’ business functions, and collaborate directly, automatically by default? For those brave few, Wave would have helped, and now a few more imperfect tools need to take up the slack.