Obligatory Google Wave Post

August 6th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

So, yeah, Google put the kibosh on Wave this week and now we must endure the inevitable tsunami (Ha! A “wave” joke) of post-mortems from the tech press. See, there’s an unwrit­ten rule in the pun­dit­sphere that says that the vol­ume of bab­ble pro­duced when a prod­uct fails is directly pro­por­tional to the amount of hype from the tech press when the prod­uct was announced.

And, good lords, was Wave hyped. It seems that every pun­dit, reporter and New Media Douchebag couldn’t wait to tell us mor­tals how Wave was going to change the very face of com­mu­ni­ca­tion itself. I remem­ber the glo­ri­ous day when I finally received my Wave invite. I tremu­lously clicked the link, looked at Wave’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary new inter­face and exclaimed, “eh, whatever.”

See, the prob­lem with Wave, a prob­lem that is endemic to Google prod­ucts is that it was con­ceived, designed and imple­mented by and for Google engi­neers. Sometimes that works for Google; the best exam­ple of that is prob­a­bly Gmail. Other times that tac­tic fails spec­tac­u­larly as it did with Wave.

The other issue plagu­ing Wave is that Google never devel­oped a nar­ra­tive for it. At no point was it ever clear to me what prob­lem Wave was going to solve for me. Contrast that with Apple’s new FaceTime fea­ture in the iPhone 4. During the run-up to the announce­ment of the iPhone 4, and even after Steve announced FaceTime I was dis­mis­sive of the con­cept of cell phone based video chat, until I saw the new iPhone 4 tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments fea­tur­ing FaceTime.

Unlike Google, Apple excels at cre­at­ing a nar­ra­tive for their prod­ucts. Thus we have com­mer­cials that por­tray sim­ple, com­pelling nar­ra­tives about FaceTime that tell us fuck-all about the tech­nol­ogy involved, but about the peo­ple using it. In the sage words of Don Draper, it’s not a wheel, it’s a carousel.

None of the above is meant to dis­par­age Google, by the way. Different com­pa­nies have dif­fer­ent strengths, and to expect every com­pany to excel in exactly the same way is just another form of Highlanderism. The tech press and pun­di­toc­racy needs to real­ize, though, that Google is a com­pany by and for engi­neers. As long as that is the case, pop­u­lar mis­fires like Wave will always happen.

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  • http://twitter.com/darxmac Thomas von Hassel

    spot on. The only other really good Google Product has to be Google Analytics … but that’s about it besides search …

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    I go hot and cold on Google Analytics (cur­rently cold). I agree that, if you’re try­ing to make money off of Adsense then it’s indis­pens­able. It’s also a good exam­ple of a case where design­ing for “engi­neers” (or at least the tech­ni­cally pro­fi­cient) is exactly the right tar­get market.

  • Gatesbasher

    Google’s got their own way of doing things, which is fine I guess… And we all use Google Search and a lot of us use Gmail, so I look at these inter­faces every day. I was never one of those who thought engi­neers were all bar­bar­ians, but hon­est to doG, would it hurt to give ANY thought to how they look?

    I could under­stand peo­ple crit­i­ciz­ing Apple for wast­ing cycles on “eye candy” (way, way, back when that was a con­sid­er­a­tion) but can’t they SEE how look­ing at this shit is suck­ing the juice out of your eye­balls?

    Is it that they think pay­ing any atten­tion to design makes them pussies? As I said some­where else, if Google ever comes out with an “iPad Killer™” tablet, using it will be like sit­ting in Hell’s wait­ing room read­ing a 50-year-old magazine.

  • http://www.facebook.com/blakergonterman Blake Gonterman

    I might also add that the Google Nexus One just went the same way as Wave. It’s still avail­able for pur­chase if you’re an Android Dev, but not for gen­eral con­sump­tion. They tried a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way of sell­ing it (directly to peo­ple from the inter­net) and it flopped. Great phone, but with­out being able to touch it first, not high on my pur­chase list.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    That’s a good point, but I’d argue that the real fail­ing of the Nexus One was the sup­port struc­ture. “Look in the FAQ” and “Check the Google Group” doesn’t really work for a prod­uct I’m pay­ing cash money for.

    As an aside, I think that the whole Android thing is a good counter-example to the points I made in the main post, but mainly because of the fact that Google is part­ner­ing with other com­pa­nies. HTC in par­tic­u­lar almost “gets it” in the way that Apple does, both from a hard­ware design and mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive. In a uni­verse where the iPhone didn’t exist I’d prob­a­bly be using some sort of HTC phone.

  • http://twitter.com/darxmac Thomas von Hassel

    Right. But it’s also ironic that the UI for Analytics is not bad and rea­son­ably “mod­ern” while GMail looks awfull

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Matt-Stocum/10505280 Matt Stocum

    The other huge issue with Wave was the invite-only aspect. That worked fine for GMail because it could talk to other email servers, GMail was just a really good web­mail client. Wave was only remotely use­ful if the peo­ple you wanted to work with also had Wave accounts.

  • ianf

    Quite apart from lack­ing nar­ra­tive for the ser­vice the Google Wave appar­ently was designed with­out any ergonomic con­sid­er­a­tions for peo­ple of less than stel­lar 20/20 sight and/or with­out >24″ desk­top mon­i­tors of Googlefolks™. I may only tried it a cou­ple of times, but soon dis­cov­ered it was prac­ti­cally unus­able on a 13″ laptop’s screen, esp. with font sizes above 16-18p, never mind 24p needed in the evening when my eyes are tired. So who were they kid­ding… design­ing a tool for PERFECTLY SIGHTED PEOPLE WITH MAGNIFICENTLY LARGE MONITORS?

  • ianf

    Quite apart from lack­ing nar­ra­tive for the ser­vice the Google Wave appar­ently was designed with­out any ergonomic con­sid­er­a­tions for peo­ple of less than stel­lar 20/20 sight and/or with­out >24″ desk­top mon­i­tors of Googlefolks™. I may only tried it a cou­ple of times, but soon dis­cov­ered it was prac­ti­cally unus­able on a 13″ laptop’s screen, esp. with font sizes above 16-18p, never mind 24p needed in the evening when my eyes are tired. So who were they kid­ding… design­ing a tool for PERFECTLY SIGHTED PEOPLE WITH MAGNIFICENTLY LARGE MONITORS?

  • Will

    That’s because Google pur­chased GA from Adaptive Path. It was called Measure Map. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that. Some of my best friends are app pur­chasers. Hell, Apple pur­chased iTunes (used to be Sound Jam).

  • Bibulb

    As nerdy as it might seem, one of the best uses I could think of for it is as a client for table­top role-playing games where not everyone’s in the same city.

    On the other hand, that’s a lot of buildup for a way to let me keep play­ing Star Frontiers with my bud­dies who’ve moved out of town.