Thursday 5 August 2010

Google failures



Interesting news about Google Wave, the supposed email killer that Google invested a lot of time and effort in, they're halting development and may close the service early next year, according to Read Write Web.

Was it a case of a product in search of a problem to solve, or too many over-smart engineers at Google and not enough people thinking through the actual usefulness for real people, or something else? Perhaps we're just not ready for the advanced functionality of Wave?

It's not going to be a big issue for them, unless they stop trying to innovate because of a high profile failure, which seems unlikely at this point. It does highlight the fact that experimentation and innovation have a high failure rate, even for very large and experienced companies, but that's no reason to stop trying, libraries, take note .