Last week I saw a tweet wondering if Google Wave could have been successful, had it launched now instead of 2010. I suspect it was more of a rhetorical question, possibly hinting at the recent launch of Inbox, which was introduced in similar terms to Wave (the next evolution of email and invite-only rollout). For me, the answer is pretty clear: as much as I loved Wave, it was too complex to ever gain mainstream adoption. Real-time communication has since become the fastest growing segment of social media, but collaborative editing hasn’t taken off, and I can’t think of an app doing both successfully. The combination of features Wave offered would have had a hard time entering corporate space as well simply because companies are reluctant to radically change their existing systems. Some concepts have been adapted into other products – for example on Medium people can comment anywhere in an article, starting a local thread, although it’s unclear if that was inspired by Wave or just a similar idea developed independently.
If Google released Wave again today - literally same product, just a few years later - do you think uptake would be different?
— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) October 22, 2014