Thursday 5 August 2010

Wave goodbye to Google Wave

Only just over a year after its launch, Google has announced the end of its Google Wave initiative as a stand alone product.

As I noted in my Google Waves hello to Microsoft post last year, the initiative introduced an integrated set of tools around email and instant messaging that would make it a whole lot easier to manage internal collaboration that other tools then on the market. It has driven some changes in other suppliers’ offerings, with Microsoft’s Outlook 2010 introducing a small part of the same functionality (and I think more will come over the coming years).

However, Google apparently never overcame the security implications of Google Wave – one of the factors that has contributed to a very poor take up of the technology by corporate customers. To quote from the Google announcement:

“ …. Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

So perhaps some of the technology will find its way into other Google products….

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