Google Wave, It's Spin Into Being and It's Failure | A Great Case Study in Innovation Failure If Anyone Involved Will Talk.

This story is a particular interesting one because it had the support of some extremely high profile organisations in Australia, in particularly the Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering that is wholely owned by the University of Sydney.

Loudly proclaiming the success of Google Wave and its inventors. the Rasmussen brothers, the Warren Centre promoted it as their presitigious 2009 Innovation Lecture saying

"...By attending the lecture you will not only gain a rare insider’s view of how this potentially world dominating technology has achieved what it has, you will also gain an insight into the very particular culture of Google that attracts, engages and inspires people to give of their best...."

Here are some excerpts from this lecture. The video is worth viewing in light of what has occurred.

From day one I found Google Wave particularly difficult to use. I thought it might have been me. How could Goggle come up with such a poor prototype with such an august school of Australian partners. I persevered then just ignored it. It simply failed day one rom my perspective!!

So I was not surprised when the following article appeared in Fast Company and I have reprinted it in full.

Google Wave, Poorly Understood and Underused, Dies in Infancy written by Dan Nosowitz appeared in Fast Company on Wed Aug 4, 2010

Google Wave was announced to great fanfare at Google's I/O 2009 conference. It sounded promising, a melange of new-world communication protocols--somewhere between an email and a chat room, but more real-time than either. Could this be Google's killer social media app, overtaking Twitter and Facebook?

But the warning signs were evident from the start. Wave proved extremely difficult to explain. I found it impossible to describe what the service was in unambiguous terms. I found myself ignoring Wave in favor of traditional instant messaging and clearer, though less capable, media like Campfire chat. It required many suggestions on how to use it, and grew slowly.

So it's not surprising that Google officially axed the project today. Wave never took off in any significant numbers, in large part due to Google's failure to position it properly. ZDNet notes that Wave might have lasted longer had it been integrated into Gmail, as Google Buzz was, rather than sequestered on its own page. I don't know if that's true--I think the product itself was just too complex to really catch on--but there's a reasonable point to be made. Wave had potential that was never reached.

Google will keep Wave live at least until the end of the year, and has already made the code behind it freely available. But the company has officially finished developing for the platform, and that very likely marks its death. So long, Wave. We hardly knew ye--and that was the problem.

The big questions remain - how did experienced engineers, the inventors of Google Maps get it so wrong? Is anybody willing to spectulate? Are the Rasmussen brithers and the University of Sydney prepared to explore this important failure properly without spin?