Nearing Zenith

Wave Couldn’t Compete with Email and Should Never Have Tried

After reading other post-mortem analyses of Google Wave’s demise, I think Google’s biggest failure still isn’t being addressed: Wave was competing with email, head on, and had no chance of winning.

Wave competed with email?

Sure it did. Wave was supposed to be the future of Internet communication and collaboration. We use all sorts of tools to accomplish this sort of stuff today, but the lowest common denominator for Internet communication is email. You may tweet or message or post to your wall or write up a tumblog post or whatever, but nearly everyone online checks their email. Email is also private, by default. Online collaboration can found with any number of online vendors, as well, but nothing could be simpler that emailing an attachment and waiting for the reply. Wave, in trying to help people communicate privately and collaboratively, was squarely in email’s territory.

Google also made the boneheaded decision to estrange Wave from it’s most likely partner for success: Gmail. The venerable Gmail suite (with Gchat and Buzz), has been a beloved service for millions of users. By keeping Gmail and Wave separated, Google gave Gmail users little reason to use Wave. Why stay on Wave if you’ll need to revert back to Gmail to connect with the rest of your (non-Wave) friends? So, thanks to Google’s forced Gmail/Wave separation, Wave and email were full competitors.

Wave couldn’t compete with email?

Right, because nothing really can, at least not directly. Google Wave competing with email is even harder than Skype competing with standard telecom voice service (phone numbers, voicemail, caller-ID and such) because email’s protocol, SMTP, is a true public standard: open, unowned, and free. No one entity can change email’s “strategy.” The informal, but heavily enforced SMTP agreement is to keep the billions of inboxes available to the trillions of email messages. That’s the strategy: keep it working. Introducing a change in your version of SMTP? Have fun facing the wrath of unhappy users who can no longer talk to their friends.

It’s worth recognizing that SMTP is one of the last remaining parts of the “open” Internet. But, like HTTP and DNS, it’s a part of the bedrock of the Internet now and not likely to go anywhere in the next few generations. Google has no more of a chance supplanting SMTP than overthrowing HTTP or DNS. Email’s so incredibly popular that it’s usually the second thing to get set up for a new business after the domain name registration. Going to school? You’ll get an email address. Starting work at a new employer? You’ll get an email address. Getting your internet connection set up? The ISP will give you an email address. They do this because it’s cheap, no one else can control it, and it just works.

(By the way: you’ll know email is history when the “email address” fields start disappearing from business and government forms, and as required information for online signup forms. Is that going to happen any time soon? Not bloody likely.)

Google shouldn’t have tried to compete with email?

Nope, because there’s a much better way to deal with email than through competition: extension! Gchat is probably the best example of this approach. Through Gmail, it’s easy to switch back and forth between email and chat. Wave could have been another type of extension, possibly replacing Gchat altogether.

Imagine this: When sending a new message to a group of contacts, waves go out to the Wave-enabled contacts (wavers?) and regular emails go to non-Wave contacts (emailers). Replies from emailers get added to the original wave (as new waves…) and get picked up automatically by the wavers. Wave functionality that isn’t possible in standard email would get sent to the emailers as a link. “We’ve made a Wave for this, so click here {link} to join us!” Pretty soon, people would get the point: Email is fine, but Wave is more.

Google should have given the emailers a reason to join and the wavers a reason to stay. By competing with email (even Gmail!) directly, we got the opposite message: Email is fine, but Wave is not.

So, now what?

I’m talking about Wave like it’s already dead and gone, which obviously isn’t true, but Google’s support and enthusiasm have been drained from Wave and that spells the end for Google’s part in bringing Wave into widespread adoption. While some parts of the code and protocols will live on through various open projects and support groups, the damage is done for both Wave and Google’s reputation for launching ambitious new services. It’s a shame for Google to screw up the launch of Wave and then give it the axe before properly integrating it with Gmail. Maybe someone else will have more luck creating a new communications platform with the Wave protocols.