Comments on Are These the Lessons Learned by the Demise of Google Wave?

• Missing the point?
• Posted by Roy Turner , Faculty at Central New Mexico Community College on August 5, 2010 at 6:00pm EDT

• I think this overlooks the fact that Wave wasn't a failure, but rather an opening salvo into the mainstreaming of web 2.0 in higher education. The basic ideas behind Wave are here to stay, and someone--whether it's Google or someone else--will figure out a way to make it work. Something as ubiquitous as Facebook or Twitter will emerge in our industry, and I think it will ultimately replace LMS models. And I hope it's a free web 2.0 feature that forces our IT departments to rethink their role in the college ecosystem.

• I Use Wave
• Posted by Sean Lancaster , Professor at Grand Valley State University on August 5, 2010 at 11:15pm EDT

• I used Wave every day socially with friends and quite often in collaboration with colleagues (e.g., great during grant writing). But I also used Wave to replace all of my class discussions in my online classes. I stopped using the Moodle discussion forum and shifted all class discussions to Wave late last year. Wave wasn't without it's problems and beta feel, but it worked really well for our needs. The only thing that I didn't like about Wave for class discussions is that it was not easy to go back and quickly grade a student's participation over the previous weeks. This is crummy, but it's not like it stopped in the middle of a semester; rather, they're telling us that Wave will exist at least through the end of the year. The nice thing about Wave is that there is no set up so once it goes away I won't feel like I've lost an investment into anything . . . and perhaps someone else will pick up the open source parts of Wave and keep it going???

• Give Google a break
• Posted by Michael Chen , IT professional on August 6, 2010 at 4:15am EDT

• Google Wave may be off the chart, but the idea of a suite of communication and collaboration tools is very much alive. Who knows, Google may come back with another and better app/solution and I would still be happy to try it out. Higher Ed seems so dependent on LMS now, but I can see it moving into the cloud. gMoodle sounds pretty cool. Google proved that "free" is a valid business model.

• Super smart problems
• Posted by Brian Mulligan , Open Learning Coordinator at Institute of Technology Sligo, Ireland. on August 6, 2010 at 9:30am EDT

• One other question that might be added to your list:

  Do the really smart people at Google really understand the normal 'late adopter' types?

  Her is a copy of a comment I posted on the "Washed up" news item:
  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/google

  As a collaborator with Ray Schroeder in testing Wave as an educational tool, even I was skeptical of its stated objective of replacing email. What I felt the system needed was a way allowing people to move very gradually into Wave without changing significantly their normal communication methods (which is by far mostly email - the news of email's death has been greatly exaggerated). One way might be the hosting of conversations in Wave that easily include people, including late adopters in the conversation via email and without registration (eg using a specific email address for the conversation). Now that is only one suggestion, which might or might not work, but what struck me most was that there was not much evidence that Google was trying to provide such a gentle transition path.
  
  It has been my observation over the last 35 years of using computers that, despite the wishful thinking of us early adopters, there are rarely revolutions in IT. It took a long time to get everyone in our organisation to adopt email (perhaps 10 years or more). Most change seems to be evolutionary. If you're not paying attention and then you notice the change, it often seems to be revolutionary, but more often than not it has been a gradual change over a number of years.
  
  Google has stated that it intends to use the technologies and ideas from Wave in other products. Perhaps this will provide such an evolutionary path that might bring us to a tool that is virtually identical to Wave. I would love a discussion track for all messages attached to specific Google Docs. Perhaps the every Doc might have a wave attached. That would certainly make me more inclined to use it (Are you listening, Google).
  
  So having used Wave, and liked it, I would like to know if others would have suggestions for an evolutionary strategy that would take us from email to a Wave-like environment.

• To Innovate Is to Risk
• Posted by E A Evans , Consultant on August 6, 2010 at 9:45am EDT

• I think the biggest lesson we might learn from Google Wave is that innovation doesn't always succeed, and that's OK.

  "Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."
  Steve Jobs

  "I have not failed. I have successfully discovered twelve hundred ideas that don't work." Thomas Edison

• Did you like the Wave, personally?
• Posted by Maria Droujkova at Natural Math on August 9, 2010 at 7:15am EDT

• I tried the Wave and disliked it within the first five minutes because of interface issues. I used it for a couple of projects: a family cookbook, and keeping brainstorming ideas with one consulting client company. It was inferior to Docs for these purposes. Now that Docs integrated chats better, it's even more so.

  I respect Google for pulling features and products that don't work, reasonably quickly. They beta test publicly, which is a Good Thing (TM) too.

  I don't see how Wave being free has anything to do with anything though. For-fee software disappears or stops being supported all the time. For example, a company may buy a competing company's software and close it down. More prosaically, software stops working because of platform changes. I can't run much of the software I used in the nineties.