Google’s product cemetery is littered with both bad and good ideas. Some failed because the execution was poor, others were simply released half-baked, or too soon.
Google Wave is probably the greatest example of this, and I was an early believer back in 2009, but just three years later Wave was dead despite doing so much right.
Mixing chat, documents, and email into a single real-time canvas
We take live collaboration in online documents for granted these days, but when Wave let people type, edit, embed, and dynamically work together all in one live space it felt like the future had arrived.
Google Docs had been around for years at this point, of course, but we were still used to a round-robin email chain to make decisions or get anything done in team projects. Wave blurred the line between document creation tools and messaging apps.
It’s funny, because the Canvas functionality we have in apps like Slack today is essentially what Google Wave was doing in 2009. I will admit that Wave was rough around the edges, which made it hard to get our heads around what a “wave” was and how to best use it, but people figured out useful things they could do together in no time flat. I had just started working at the psychology department in a large university in the second year of Wave’s existence, and we were pretty excited at the possibilities both for team work between staff, and how we could use it for education.
Live, character-by-character collaboration years before it was normal
Google Docs had launched in 2006 after Google bought Writely, and here you could see what other people were doing on the document as they worked. However, at the time it wasn’t really “real-time”, but updated every few seconds. Sort of like an auto-save interval when things would sync up.
Wave, on the other hand, used a very cool technology called Operational Transformation (OT), as per a 2009 InfoQ interview with Google Software engineer Dhanji Prasanna. This was what allowed you to see exactly what everyone else was doing in a Wave with no perceptible delay. It also solved the complex problem of how you prevent conflicts when multiple people are editing the same thing.
Today, this experience lives on in the Google productivity suite, and pretty much in any other collaborative web-based platform. Now we just take it for granted that any online document is effectively multiplayer.
Integrated extensions and bots that automated conversations
Wave was designed so you could build on it, customize it, and make it fit the needs of your team or organization. That meant embedded gadgets, bots, automation, polls, maps, and much more. We see that today in apps like Slack with bots, apps, and integrations. You can also easily add third-party extensions to tools like Google Docs with a few clicks of a button.
While it was pretty chaotic at first, Wave was one of the first examples of this integration and flexibility.
A federated, open protocol designed to replace email
If Wave was just a fancy collaboration tool, it wouldn’t be so notable, but Google had much bigger plans for it. Wave was an open protocol, and Google’s vision for it involved federated servers run by third party hosts. Can you imagine the Google of today letting its services be run like that?
The idea was that the Wave protocol would be something that could replace email with a modern, rich communication and collaboration system. To date, nothing has come close to replacing email though, and I suspect we’ll all still be using email millions of years from now after we’ve evolved into crabs.
The idea of federated services lives on today though. We’ve had decentralized apps and, of course, services like Mastodon and Bluesky use a federated hosting model too.
Concepts that failed in 2009 but define productivity today
I used Google Wave almost throughout its entire life, and I get why it failed. It wasn’t entirely undeserved. The UI was awful, dense, and not at all like Google Docs or Drive is today. When I tried to get my colleagues to join me on Wave, they often just gave up. They didn’t understand the concepts, and I even had to provide training!
Also, don’t forget that back then “broadband” was so slow that today you’d think your internet was broken, and the real-time collaboration thing was scary and new. It definitely caused some information overload, like trying to work in a noisy boardroom.
While the Wave collapsed (ha!) its DNA clearly lives on in software we all use today—real-time collaboration, unified communication, extensibility, shared workspaces—these are just normal software features now. It’s why we can work remotely and projects can be planned and executed quickly and efficiently. Fast internet connections, powerful computers, and yes, even the latest addition of better automation through AI have brought the vision of Wave to reality—except for email. That’s going to be the same forever.
