Google discontinues Google Wave development

Today, Google has announced that it stops further development of its revolutionary collaboration service Google Wave. The official reason - "service has not seen the user adoption we would have liked". Two months ago Google Wave was opened to public and included into Google Apps, but apparently, not too many people gave it a second chance after not successful beta-testing. Google Wave will continue to exist, but in the future it may be closed - i.e. the service will be in the same state, as Google Notebook (although still with new user registration). For those who use the service, Google plans to open source the code of the main modules (so that they could restore the basic functionality on its own servers) and provide tools for migrating data from Google Wave. And now about why this occurred with the service that was supposed to change the world:



Google Wave was designed as an Email alternative. Instead of sending messages overloaded with quotations back and forth, all communication in Google Wave are structured on the single page. Excellent idea. But, unfortunately, the developers did not stop at this simple-and-brilliant idea, but decided to create a super-platform-for-everything at once.



We have already mentioned that the main problem of Google Wave - is complexity. People do not understand how to use it and why they need it at all. But not so long ago EMail also was complex and unclear for most people. So Google Wave team failed to gradually engage users and developers in the new technology but scared them with something confusing.

And the other side of the coin is that the more complex system is - the more people support and develop it, the more bugs appear, the more computing resources are required for it's operation. Taking into account that Google Wave - is absolutely free product, we can imagine, how much money it costs to Google.

But why Google wouldn't correct the mistakes and wait until the new technology will be adopted by the public? The idea of the service is still excellent and the company has enough money to wait. But the reason is that Google is now developing another ambitious project - the social network to compete Facebook. And the company decided to move Google Wave team to this project, becuase they have a unique experience in the social communication technologies. Thus, Google Wave is just a victim of circumstances (and the bad management).

See also: Top 10 Office suites