While it’s an old news that google wave is being phased out, it appears that google has miscalculated the launch of this potentially game changing product and is also killing it prematurely. What’s new is that Google just opened up the service for Google App for business, and this google wave could have been a very effective way to communicate in the workspace. My boss Rajiv has been a strong proponent of using real time chat for operation management (see Benefits of Using Real-Time Group Chat (IRC) in Technology Operations Management)

With google adding the service to the google application for business offerings, it would have been easier to adopt the corporate users (that is if the corporate is allowing to set up one of the domains with google app) and allow corporate users to “wave” the conversation for various technology operations such as releases, troubleshooting, or even corporate events.

Focusing on the troubleshooting, it’s pretty common that if you are on a troubleshooting bridge, whenever a new person joins the call, oftentimes, the person managing the call has to provide the status updates, and that often could be somewhat distracting to the people who are investigating the issue as it disrupts the flow and conversation that had been taken place. Wave could have been a great solution for 1) providing the history of the threads 2) allowing private conversation without interrupting the group calls and 3) providing a very complete tracking of the issues at hand. This product could have been hence integrated with many Runbook Automation systems, as well as google search engine and would have allowed a room for a birth of fairly interesting correlation engine using google’s sophisticated search algorithm. After all, Wave could have replaced mailing list archive, forums, and any support type Q&As or FAQs – which is pretty much all the stack exchange type sites are doing these days anyway.

I wish google have waited a bit longer before announcing the end of the product, as I believe many would have found a good use out of it. Rather, Google might have been caught up too much on the social aspect of it. Most likely Google will find a way to utilize the code base in some other way and perhaps they will think of a way to target corporate/SMB market first next time.