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Google today announced that it will be suspending development on Google Wave, the communications tool it launched last year. Wave attracted unprecedented hype in the run-up to its launch, with Wave invites serving as a kind of geek status symbol and going for $70 on eBay. But despite the initial enthusiasm, Google reports that Wave “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked”.
I used Wave once or twice once I managed to get an invite. It was one of the most befuddling experiences I have ever had using technology. Wave was supposed to be a sort of combination instant messenger, email, and file-sharing software platform with social media inputs and outputs. But like a lot of attempts to combine existing services and solutions, instead of being “both-and”, Wave ended up being “neither-nor”. You could IM with Wave, but it lacked the simplicity of a basic IM client. You could send messages with Wave like email, but why do that when users already had GMail? You could post maps and files, but in my experience anything beyond basic messaging was buggy and complicated. I saw somebody say online that the feeling they got using Wave must be like the feeling elderly people get when they have to use computers at all. That sums up my experience with Wave pretty economically.
Wave was a bold attempt to abstract the entire idea of “messaging” into one coherent service. But it lacked one very important thing that makes disruptive ideas stick: simplicity. It really doesn’t matter how innovative or disruptive your technology is. The plain truth is that if it’s complicated, nobody is going to want to use it. Nobody, that is, outside a small circle of enthusiasts who appreciate the technology for what it is. There’s nothing wrong with being an enthusiast. But most people are not enthusiasts, and so it’s no surprise that Wave lacked user adoptions when many people who tried to use it couldn’t find a problem it could solve that wasn’t already solved by something simpler.
Google loses nothing by canceling Wave, of course, and in all likelihood we’ll see Wave re-emerge down the line as something that really does change our lives. Google would do well to remember that it’s the simple things that tend to be the most disruptive.
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Casting Out Nines 
Nathan and I used Wave to plan out some of our Time Out sessions, but when Google Docs started allowing both of us to write at the same time, we didn’t need Wave any more.
I agree with everything you said. Confusing and buggy to be sure. No one mentions this either, but the design was really unattractive. I really hated the way the scrollbars looked. I used it a few times mostly to talk with classmates in my ITMA program, but we ultimately abandoned it and went back to our former primary means of communication—Facebook.