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Tide Turns on Google Wave

It takes longer to stop an oil spill than kill a tech product these days.

Just over a year ago, Google provided a glimpse of Google Wave at its annual developer conference. It wasnt exactly clear what Google Wave was, but it was pretty darn impressive. It was the latest from Google that was to revolutionize web communications and collaboration--built by some of its smartest engineers sequestered in a skunk-works lab down-under. It was released under closed beta last fall with great excitement, and just a few months ago publicly released to a dull thud.

"It was killed abruptly because no one was buying it and there no was no credible reason to believe anyone would." That quote is from a unnamed Microsoft executive in a NYT article referring to the Microsoft Kin phone. Same story--different conglomerate. It takes longer to stop an oil spill than kill a tech product these days.

Google Wave was spearheaded by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, formerly of Google Maps, which was formerly Where 2 Tech before being acquired by Google. The vision was a single communications model that could span all or most of the models in use on the web today. A "wave" was described as "equal parts conversation and document." An incredible goal, further expanded with the hope to deliver new forms of communication rather than electronic forms of pre-web tools. But the problem with "best of" solutions, is sometimes they become "worst of". No one knew what to do with Wave.

Wave didn't replace email, though it offered some email capabilities. It offered multi-party Instant Messaging with chronological playback, but didn't play well with existing IM networks. It offered document mark-ups and collaboration, but it wasn't familiar. It had Wiki and social aspects too--but Google Wave didn't really replace anything. Google Wave was a hodgepodge of cutting edge real-time collaboration, creation, and communication tools determined best unused. Emails death continues to be exaggerated.

Google Senior VP of Operations Urs H�lzle announced the demise of Wave via blog: "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We dont plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product...central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Waves innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source." Both of those cited features are already incorporated into other Google products (character by character collaboration is now part of Google Docs, and drag and drop attachment support was added to Gmail).

Google Wave was an interesting tapestry of unified communications technologies. In addition to real-time text collaboration, it supported video conferencing, IM, presence, and messaging. The product itself may be a failure, but the technology behind it will survive as open source code. An eerily similar fate to EtherPad. After Google acquired AppJet, it open sourced the code that enabled EtherPad to offer simultaneous collaborative editing.

Does Google have a strategy for unified communications? Probably, but the insiders are not talking. Google is actually in the midst of several beneficial waves. There is the whole cloud thing which continues to dominate CIO conversations--Google offers its App Engine for cloud development and Googe Apps for Office productivity including email and calendaring. With its recent Google Apps upgrade, the suite was repositioned as an alternative to Microsoft Office 2010. Google Docs does not have anywhere near the features of Microsoft Word, but it does win in real time collaboration.

Google is also riding a wave in mobility with its Android operating system, now with over 200,000 new daily activations. How does Google make money giving away Android? By reducing the market influence of Apple, RIM, and Microsoft and with advertising. CEO Eric Schmidt said "Remember we make the majority of our money on advertising and the powerful browser that is in Android when people search--they click on ads and that revenue goes to Google. And trust me that revenue is large enough to pay for all of Android activities and a whole bunch more. I should also say we love the success of the iPhone, because the iPhone also uses Google search and we get a good chunk of that revenue when people search on the iPhone."

Then there is that enigma of Google Voice--currently a consumer grade service, it offers messaging and transcription and integrates with other Google Applications. With Googles acquisitions of Gizmo5 (SIP) and On2 (codecs) its arsenal of technologies suggest a stronger comprehensive UC offering is likely in the works.

Google was right to kill Wave quickly. The writing was on the proverbial wall. Either kill the product quickly or support it forever in fear of angering loyal customers. The world is happily surfing the web without Wave. But only the product is dead, we will see components of Wave in different forms in other products in and out of Google. After all, collaboration, presence, and everything else Wave offered is forming a bigger wave of unified communications.