With that, yesterday, Google announced they have shut down the development of the product and plan on dropping all support for it by the end of this year. The code and technology behind the product will remain on Google’s servers indefinitely as an open-source platform, but gone for good are its stand-alone web-app days. For concerned “heavy users” of Wave, Google is developing export tools, so the data will not get lost when the service goes down for good. This development wasn’t hard to see coming. Nearly every Wave user I interviewed had not figured out what to do with Wave, not to mention its mediocre performance. Even on popular social network sites such as Digg, despite many comments, the unanimous opinion was that “Wave” was an innovative but useless product. It’s kind of like the baby mop outfit. I mean, sure its “looks” like an excellent idea. But who’s going to put their kid in one? Besides, once they learn to walk, then it’s pretty much obsolete. :)
Goodbye, Google Wave. What else you got in your bag of tricks, Vic? If Google was wise they should have killed gMail :) Someone needs to do it, it might as well be Google. At least they have/had a better mouse trap. And that’s the problem really, people are confusing email with Wave. Email was 20th century (at best), Wave was what online communication should be in 2010. That being said, I agree with Shocker in that the performance was never what it needed to be and I personally found that the “Waves” became to large and unwieldy. I think overtime we would have figured out how-to use it but I guess now we wont have that chance. Think about what a company can do with all the data that is gathered from offering a free email client. 1 – Google Ads can be displayed through the client 2 – Data can be harvested regarding what people are talking about and interested in 3 – Relationship mapping can be created (MrGroove talks to this person and that person talks to that person etc…) 4 – Email Address Harvesting is automatic and free. As soon as a gmail account sends someone an email (non gmail account) and that person responds, they have a valid email address they can now sell or market against. And of course if someone send someone with a GMAIL account an email, tadaa, they now have a valid email address they can sell or market against etc… 5 – Brand recognition – Remember, any advertising is good advertising… GMAIL / Google, yeah… using GMAIL you are that much more likly to use Google’s other services like Calendar, Google Docs, Google Search, Google Picasa, Google Wave (Oops… that’s dead sorry) 6 – Stepping stone into Google Apps for corp users – If your familiar with the interface since the wee age of 10 or 12….. when you grow up guess what app platform you will use!!! So yeah, GMAIL is going NO WHERE PERIOD and if Google ever things about dumping it like Google Wave I’m going to instantly sell short on the GOOG stock because their management team would have lost their minds! It’s ironic, isn’t it? The mighty Google finally invents a great, new, groundbreaking idea. They don’t know how to market it and grow it. so then they kill the idea. Once they kill gmail then they should probably sack their marketing dept too. Wave deserved more than this. Comment
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