Farewell then, Google Wave. We hardly knew you. Or, to be more precise, we hardly knew how to use you: the communication and collaboration platform, dumped last night by Google because it now has about 12 users, was the most absurdly confusing piece of software ever released by the corporation.
The hubristic child of Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the guys who brought you Google Maps), Wave was a brilliant solution to a problem that didn't exist. It was billed as "equal parts conversation and document", but it's perhaps better explained as "Track Changes on steroids". Which gives you some idea of how grotesquely clunky and unhelpful it was.
This is a humiliating capitulation for Google, but despite launching with extraordinary fanfare late last year, Wave was doomed from the start. It was too complex, too counter-intuitive and appeared to have no benefit to users that would justify the learning curve and all the new words: wave, blip... it was a whole new world of silly new terminology and a timeline-based UI that most people just weren't ready for.
"If you could design email from scratch, this is what it would look like," said one of the Rasmussens at the time. Well, maybe, but you can't, can you? Everyone struggled to get to grips with Wave (even as the hype led to invitations being sold for over $70 on eBay), and, as the company admitted in last night, things never got any better.
So the lid has slammed shut on future development, and Wave will probably be offline by January. Can anyone honestly say they'll miss it?
