Google puls the plug on Wave
Google are one of the biggest players on the internet and they have many huge projects under their belt including search engine, Google Adsense and Adwords, Analytics, Maps, Docs, Translate, Gmail, so it came as a major surprise when they decided to pull the plug on Google Wave. Google Wave was first mentioned in May 2009, and did not become available to consumers until May 19th 2010. However less than 3 months later on August 4th 2010, Google has decided to discontinue any work with Wave. Google Wave will still be functional until at least the end of 2010.
In the current climate of communication online, Google Wave looked to be a winner on paper. Its existence combined both instant messages and emails to enable people to communicate in real time using shared documents. ‘Waves’ including text and multimedia were transmitted to users as soon as they were typed or created. Individuals involved within a wave could reply to and edit a wave as well as linking it to other waves and adding other people to waves. All individuals involved within a wave can see text as it is being typed.
The concept of Google Wave does indeed sound complicated and did put some users off but it should have been a very useful tool for businesses, especially multinational companies. Two reasons for its failing are thought to be the absence of a successful marketing campaign and the lack of people invited to Google Wave. Google Wave’s marketing strategy relied on a 1 hour video, which is sure to have put some people off after 10 minutes. When a new program launches people want to know almost everything about it within 10 minutes, not an hour. Regarding the lack of invites, initially only 100 000 people were invited to try out Wave. It is assumed most of these invitees got bored with Wave as they had no one to ‘wave’ with.
It is hard to believe a Google project not working; after all they have massive success with all their other online programs. One does wonder what mastermind Google will come up with next. As their CEO, Eric Schmidt said “This is a company where it is okay to try something that is very hard and not have it be successful”. Eric’s mindset is basically that it is necessary to take risks and aim high, and that not all Google projects have to be winners. Therefore I think we will not have to wait too long for the next Google project to surface, which is looking more likely to be in the social media sector after a recent investment in Zynga and taking over Slide.