Google Wave and the Difficulty of Radical Change

cedarhillbilly writes "An article by Matt Asay in the Register takes on Google Wave from the perspective of visionary change versus incremental change. He suggests that visionaries should focus on smaller transformations of our day-to-day lives rather than leapfrogging. 'Much as it may want to radically change the world for users and developers, radical change generally happens over time, through a series of incremental, unexceptional edits to existing technology and processes.' Perhaps Google sensed this when they famously said they were worried about having too many geniuses. Asay revisits the point that the open source development model necessarily builds on a community of contributors and users, and not the mad scientist in an ivory tower."

Re:I couldn't disagree more

[asavage]

I think your points are good. Additionally it was too buggy. Google is good at producing proof of concept software but don't seem to have people willing to flush out bugs (outside of core projects). A messenger or collaboration tool needs to show who is online. When I started using Google wave it would show yourself as online with a green dot but didn't show anyone else online. They eventually fixed this, but when they did, it was still broken. I have a friend who was always marked as online for several months even though they didn't login once. Google wave would also get slower and slower as the wave grew larger. If two people are just using it to talk after about an hour it would become so slow you could type a sentence before the first letter would appear on the screen. There are lots of interesting features but if you can't even get the basics working properly your product is not fit for general use.