14 DAY TRIAL // After several years in development, but just two months after the official launch, Google Wave, the hyped collaboration and communication service, has been killed off. Google will not waste any more time and money on it. The reason for the decision is simple: Google Wave just wasn’t seeing enough growth.
As it happens, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was present at a tech conference, just after the announcement came, and the the obvious question came up, ‘why kill Google Wave.’ The CEO defended the decision and said that Google is not afraid of trying new things and not afraid of failing at them.
He said that there are always risks with new products and you can’t know what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately, Wave just wasn’t seeing the adoption numbers the company expected from it.
"Our policy is we try things," Schmidt said. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."
Schmidt said that, even though Wave is dead, the technologies developed by the team will live on in other Google project. “[W]e are taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced. We'll get the benefit of Google Wave but it won't be as a separate product."
The Wave team may be moving to the 'Facebook-killer' project
Schmidt mentions future, unannounced Google projects, to which Wave technologies will be applied. While Google hasn’t said anything yet, everyone is thinking of the same thing, Google Me, the rumored social network the company is apparently working on. Google seems to be heavily invested in this new project and is diverting a lot of resources and manpower to it. Given Google’s track record with social web products, it’s hard to know how will the latest move fare, but the company is certainly trying.
The decision to shut down Wave is in line with how the company operates and this is what the CEO is saying also. Google has killed off big projects before and not just companies it acquired. The most recent and the most notable is the Nexus One web store, which was intended to revolutionize the way people buy handsets, but which closed its doors just a few weeks ago after it failed to see the sale numbers Google wanted.
Google Buzz is doing great
Interestingly, Schmidt said that Google Buzz, another product which launched to a lot of hype but which got panned afterwards, is actually doing rather well and has several tens of millions of users. Ultimately, any tech company that has the courage to shut down even its biggest projects should be commended. Microsoft did it very recently with the Kin, Apple has done it in the past and, obviously, Google does it as well.