Not every project should be a success. But seems most of the largest companies, once they are big,  ignore this and are always eager to support the projects they launch to their last consequences.

Google, the King Midas of IT, knows how Internet works and has always preferred to bet to many projects that may (or may not) revolutionize the way the  people use Internet. And they keep trying and doing it very well every day.

Wave was meant to change the way people use e-mail. It was a mixture of Google docs, Twitter, Facebook, Google calendar, Gmail and almost Facebook Apps.

Probably wave had so many possibilities that made the system too complex. Also, the leap between mail and Wave was too big. So, as soon as people started using it, they saw all of the advantages but not how to take the most of them in their daily basis.

Wave failed in the most important quality that Internet requires: flexibility. Wave required that all of your friends and contacts were also Wave users. This kind of environment may work in Facebook, which started as a parallel tool to e-mail to socialize. But the key for Wave to work was to have all of your contacts there (not just your closest friends). So the system started since the beginning, trying to migrate users from other e-mail servers to Wave in order to really work. This was way too ambitious (and probably too naive).

Keep busy trying or get busy dying. And experimenting is the way the Internet has been built. Not every project has to succeed (most of them don’t). And Google is doing well recognizing its failure and retracting from going forward with Wave.

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