It came. It went. The end of email was predicted and in the end it’s Google Wave that bowed out.
Looks like we didn’t have to wait long to see what the future would have in hold for Google Wave: on August 4th, Google announced that they were pulling the plug on Wave due to lack of user adoption, and discontinuing its development as a standalone product.
Google Wave is simply a way of communicating, with its own protocol, which aims to replace IM and e-mail and other means of some-to-some communication.
Why did it fail?
In one of my previous articles, I talked about how industry experts were declaring ’email a thing of the past’ and that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook would replace email and eventually take over as our online means of communication.
Why didn’t Wave take off like Twitter and Facebook? Were they overly ambitious with what they were trying to achieve? Did they fail to identify a particular need or problem that it was supposed to solve?
This PC World article states, ‘Jonathan Yarmis, a senior research fellow with analyst Ovum, said Wave’s strengthits lack of definitionwas also its greatest weakness as you could do any of the things incorporated into Wave in other, more accessible, fashions.’
There you go. If people don’t know how to use your tool, gadget, product, and they can currently do what you are proposing elsewhere, you become just like the last shiny new toy!.
Identifying the pain point that you are trying to solve is key when developing a new product. Fortunately for Google, they are big enough and financially secure to be able to innovate and have a few duds along the way. As for the rest of us, we’ll sit back and wait for the next big ’email-killer.’
Until then.
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