Wave goodbye

[slowsculpture]

I was joking with a fellow Android user at work, last month, that if Apple had created Wave, by now it would be so ubiquitous that there'd by an Android app. I am sorry to see Wave go, just when it was getting interesting, but if this means Google is trying to trim the wild branches and get more focused on the projects that are important to them, then that's a silver lining I can live with.

As someone who uses Google products every day (including an unofficially abandoned Android device,) I'm coming to see the company more and more as a shop with more cool projects than project managers. When they throw their full weight behind a product, the result is always great. But they don't seem to have much of a vision for how their total set of products should work together, with the result that lots of very 'wow-ing' apps and services just never find a place in the broader product/marketing strategy. If Apple is really girding itself for war, then that's a lesson Google needs to learn fast.

Comments

[vlion]

My general impression about Google is that they are, as a company culture, terrifically immature and unprepared to deal entirely with the complexities of geopolitics and corporate intrigue. They have the classic geek weakness for gadgets that are useless but fun, and they are not very wise about what sorts of data they keep.

It is interesting to watching them make the shift from high-speed innovator to established company. I don't think they are doing it adroitly.