On Aug 5, 1:31 am, Brett Morgan <brett.mor...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pretty simple really. > > Wave had 60+ engineers assigned. If you assume each engineer costs somewhere > between 100k and 250k total spend (salary, office space, airfares, accom, > shares, ...), then you are looking at somewhere between $6M and $20M a year > in project cost. Plus servers, bandwidth, etc, etc. > > To justify that number takes a serious uptake of usage. As the press release > says, Wave wasn't seeing the uptake expected. So it got killed, and the > engineers will be moved on to other projects that are justifying their cap > ex spend.
Interesting. If I may say something - as a wave fan and user really disappointed by this (predictable?) decision - is only that wave has been handled pretty bad. I'm sure the work done is something big, and that the 60+ engineers worked hard, but the way in which Google handled the whole thing... I felt pretty soon that wasn't done right. Surely, having hype helps when diffusing a product, but I think that introducing a platform is something pretty big, which requires long time, strong positions and most of all something that users may immediately appreciate. Wave has been launched with the formula "we want you to help us", but to assure the project a long way, you can't start with still have the standards to be defined. I think that Google should have first developed a complete and formal system, which - even if incomplete - could provide evident advantages (as Wave was when it was released), and immediately make the user base larger by providing usable API. Wave wasn't like that: the simple client-server protocol wasn't well defined and it was initially marked as low-priority, but most users don't care about server-side protocol. Google provides the Wave service, it's a good start, it's not important if you want it to become a widespread standard, first of all you must make users in the position of using that protocol. I started to look at wave with deep interest. Me as many others, thought that such platform could lead to new kind of communication tools, new kind of real-time interaction over the net, but when Wave has been released, we found only a playground to see if we had ideas on how to use the GUI you created. I'm not aware about any Python/Java/ C++ API that was enabling users to interact quickly with wave, so client-side projects and ideas - that are the only things that can lead to a widely used technology - were precluded. It took a whole year to see the client Open Source, and still was "too personal to be quickly used". Don't get me wrong: this strategy may work. If you open your technology and state your interests (e.g. replacing mails), some users may be interested in helping the "low level development", but most of users don't care about it and the real potential of the project well be evident only in the long term, because common developers will have to wait for defined protocols, working APIs, a working set of base features. This kind of project handling can lead to a pretty quick diffusion: even if partially wrong and incomplete, users could start to invent new things using the good platform it is. Instead, Google mostly said "hey, look how good is this technology. It's wonderful, but could be better. So, before making it usable, we expect you to help us in making it even better". This could work, but you can't expect to make money fast. Before having a good web client, I think it would have been better to give APIs that allowed users to develop their new applications, their new clients, around the platform capabilities. I always felt that something was wrong with Wave... And that "something" - I think - were the priorities. The project had the highest priority to make itself better, before make itself flexible and usable. Maybe I missed something, but this is how I see it (and how I experienced it, when I had to cope with Wave for my interest and for work). As a google and wave fan, as programmer who had many ideas about how to use that platform and as a programmer who waited a long time for an effective and usable API (which I couldn't find), I'm really hoping that google don't give up about the whole project. Hoping that if not 60+, at least 2/5 engineers can be kept developing an idea that, at least, is very good (and the hype was all about this: really a great idea). Well, my 2 cents :) Thanks anyway for all the work done so far. ~Aki -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Wave API" group. To post to this group, send email to google-wave-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-wave-api+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-api?hl=en.
