> I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave.
I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.
I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.
Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."
I know it's easy for me to say in hindsight, but I think that as the CEO Eric Schmidt's big failure with Wave wasn't "I should have cancelled it sooner" but "I should have encouraged a better, more focused product".
I don't know.. I'm trying to think of a product that was fundamentally broken in v1 that was eventually "fixed" by exec encouragement/buyin/investment and ended up succeeding. Maybe Internet Explorer. Yea, I suppose Microsoft is the master of this "v1=shit, v2=shit, v3=barely usable, v4=world dominating" approach.
And if that's your metric, then why slow-roll the launch by making it invite only? If the answer is performance, like I suspect it may be, then why launch if you cannot achieve success by the sole metric you appear to be looking at?
I don't think so. If you'd asked Wave's designers before the launch, their vision surely would have included increasing usage. It turns out few people cared about Wave.
Schmidt's decision has been borne out by events. Did Wave take off when open sourced? No. Did anything Wave-like developed subsequently turn into a big market? Also no.
I agree to a point but I want to see numbers leading to reasoning. If you identify why the numbers are bad and it is not something you can or want to turn around then sure, kill it. Killing off projects based only numbers alone is tyranny of the bean-counters.
> Did Wave take off when open sourced?
Eh, how many "dump and run" open-source projects take off? Bringing an opensource community to life is its own brutally hard problem.
The numbers were bad, Duncan, because not many people wanted to use it. Your theory that they are "killing off projects based only numbers" is something you appear to have made up.
I think Google's real error was not killing it too soon, but allowing it to be developed in a bubble and then springing it on the world with a giant, "Ta da!" It let them ignore a lot of real-world problems and questions, investing heavily in untested design hypotheses. Once you get to the point of a huge global launch, you've baked in problems in a way that is very hard to fix.
Slack is basically a spiffed-up IRC. Trello is a virtual index card board. Neither is, "designed to merge key features of communications media such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking."
> has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech?
Schmidt was CEO from 2001 to 2011. During that time period, Google basically invented all the infrastructure we take for granted in distributed systems today, popularized the concepts of JavaScript-heavy web applications and Software as a Service, created from scratch a new browser (Chrome) and a new operating system (Android) which promptly dominated the market, and became one of the top five largest companies in the world.
Chrome wasn't created from scratch, it was WebKit-based (which Apple didn't start from scratch either, it was KHTML-based). This not to deprecate Google, but to give some credit to the open-source projects they based their work on.
No... it was bought by Google in a very primitive form, years before even its initial release. Android at the time of acquisition would be mostly unrecognizable today.
I don't think it's fair to say: "They only bought it so it doesn't count." You could just as easily say: "They only hired Paul Buchheit, he was the one who came up with GMail, not Google." Real inventions aren't spontaneous point events, they take many years of development, and can die anywhere along the way if you don't continuously create the necessary environment to foster them.
He certainly has business achievements but I'm not sure how much these count as invention as I mean it. The type of invention I have in mind is where novelty is a significant obstacle i.e. it requires education and transformation in the expectations and behaviour of the audience not just solving technical problems. In this type of invention, you have to swim upstream against the numbers holding on to a vision to break through.
- Chrome - competitive play - iterative improvements over competitors
- Android - competitive play - purchased, playing catch-up to competitors
- Infrastructure - internal services
Basically, is he is more Xerox Copier division than Xerox Parc?
Obviously Eric wasn't creating the inventions himself, but I would argue that he fostered innovation very effectively in the way he ran the company. Eric hired amazing people and put them into an environment where bottom-up innovation could happen, and then he stood back and let it happen. It was chaotic, but a lot of great stuff came out of it.
OTOH, when Larry took over, things became much more top-down, with Larry trying to be Steve Jobs and tell the company what they should be building next -- most notably when it came to Google+.
I left before Sundar took over so I don't know how he runs things, but it seems like Google these days is just sort of chugging along, building solid products but not doing anything revolutionary.
You use the term innovation which I avoided because it typically only means "bring to market" instead of invention which I see as novel work to traverse a wilderness of unknowns. He views his mistake not as identifying a fault in the vision or the implementation but in not responding to numbers soon enough which I find telling. You can't lose sight of the shore to discover new worlds if you require positive numbers at every step.
The Larry approach sounds more vision-led and its interesting how it looks when it fails. Its difficult to see beyond the survivorship bias and only see it as egotistical and ignorant failure.
I think we disagree on the meaning of innovation. I don't like the term "invention" because it suggest a point event rather than a continuous process. I don't think "innovation" means "bring to market"; they are two separate phases in a process.
The real mistake with Wave was that a group of incredibly smart engineers were basically allowed to go into a bubble and build whatever they wanted for an extended period of time. Successful innovation needs to be anchored by a real problem to solve. E.g. the best programming frameworks always come from someone who is building a real app on top, not from someone who set out to build a programming framework. The feedback loop is necessary to keep developers focused on the actual needs of users, rather than on whatever problem they find most interesting to solve.
I think Eric is referencing the poor usage numbers as a proxy for the fact that the Wave team was not building something that users really wanted.
(FWIW my own startup, Sandstorm.io, had a pretty poor record on this point as well.)
Especially with Flickr stagnating at the hands of Yahoo, Google more or less had the market for a high-quality photo sharing site to itself had it wanted it.
That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.
It’s interesting you are thinking of them as the high-quality niche, saying not a huge demand for full resolution.
Problem wasn’t full resolution, it was re-compressing your originals. Photographers that care about full res, care about original quality.
While there were (and still are) options like SmugMug for photogs, Flickr was the only prosumer one supporting unlimited original quality.
Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much?
Turns out photographers who posted and curated 50,000 photos are not big fans of having the rug pulled out from under them by people in marketing trying to change the UI for their own engagement metrics.
>Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much
I actually think that's somewhat fair. I could come up with some things that I wish were better with Flickr and there are probably lots of things I'm not thinking of. But I still use it and, in conjunction with Lightroom, I find it's a pretty good way to display a curated collection of edited photographs (as well as serving as a backup of last resort).
I did object to the big UI change a few years ago and still don't really love it. On the other hand, I don't actually use the web interface much. I upload from Lightroom and I mostly view from a tablet.
Docs pretty much threw out all the Writely code and switched over to a new editor built from scratch (codename "Kix") in 2010. I'm not sure if Kix used code from Wave, though.
I'm pretty sure there is no lineage from Wave to Kix (which, yes, was the code name for the modern incarnation of Docs). Kix is more of a descendant of the architecture of Google Sheets.
Source: I am one of the original authors of Writely, did not work on Kix but I was still at Google when it was being written, had a minor role in reviewing the design.
Out of curiousity: with these full rewrites, do they at least learn from the mistakes of the previous code? I can imagine there is potentially great value in that.
Good question. I don't know how much of that was done in this case. I can say that at the outset of the Kix project, they did ask me for advice about pitfalls. (I was skeptical that it could be done at all using the browser technology of that time; they proved me wrong. One of my concerns was proper handling of complex international character sets, both for input and rendering.)
Kix is a drastically different architecture than Writely, so many lessons would not have been applicable. Writely was built on a contentEditable DIV, so the data model was literally whatever junky HTML the browser's contentEditable implementation would create, and synchronization was implemented by performing three-way diffs on the HTML code. It was very much a dancing bear, in the sense of "the amazing thing is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all". ...but I digress. My point is that the mechanisms and challenges of that approach are entirely different than the Kix approach. I think the important lessons would have been product-level rather than code-level.
I dunno, the description you just gave of a dancing bear gives me the impression that your advice must have contained quite a bit of insight about past mistakes to avoid.
Bear in mind that this was almost a decade ago, and I wasn't directly involved. With that caveat: the core mechanisms for client / server coordination in Kix were a direct descendant from Trix (short for "Matrix"), which was the original code name for Google Sheets. And Kix was developed by a team in New York, an offshoot of the Trix team which was also in New York. Writely (post-acquisition) was in Mountain View, and Wave was in Australia (I forget which city), and the picture that might give you of how closely the various teams communicated is probably accurate.
I don't know whether Trix originally used OT specifically, or the Kix team borrowed that idea from Wave. But the basic idea of clients performing small, tidy logical operations and then synchronizing them in realtime through a server was part of both Trix and Kix. Writely used a very different (and more primitive) approach.
I don't know anything about the origin of the comments feature, but my guess is that there was no connection to Wave, except (again) possibly a bit of inspiration. The Wave team was very separate, both geographically and organizationally, and the tech stack they built was very disconnected from anything that was going on with Trix, Kix, or Writely.
Wave was in Sydney, the only Google engineering office in Australia. I walked through their space before they had even announced the project internally. All that almost everyone in the company knew was that Lars and co. were busy on something big. The rest of the office was aware of its nature, but sworn to secrecy until the announcement. I remember going by a whiteboard, looking at this architecture diagram (wavelets?) and still having little clue on what it was all about, other than it having something to do with threads. :-)
I was asking because I have a vague recollection that Kix borrowed OT ideas or even code from Wave. But then I was even more removed from both teams than you. Or maybe it was just an aspirational thing from management to find a silver lining in the Wave shutdown.
You might be right about the OT idea, or even some code, having been borrowed from Wave. I wouldn't necessarily have known about it (or I might simply have forgotten). But I'm pretty certain that Kix as an overall project was much more closely connected to Trix than to Wave.
I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.