Google Wave Development Halted: Premature death of a business tool

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Just weeks after grapevine on Google’s new social networking venture, the search engine ace has decided to drop its visionary collaborative messaging service - Google Wave. We had anticipated Google Wave as a Web 3.0 product with high potential as a business tool, but it’s being dumped long before its maturity. Google Wave has failed to carve a niche in the business or any other community.

This is yet another failure form the house of Google Labs, which is acknowledged for producing an array of experimental products including Google Docs and Spreadsheets, GOOG-411, Google Reader, iGoogle, Google Maps, and Google Groups.

Google Wave was designed to allow real time interaction using an in-box-like interface that combined Google’s Gmail Web mail service, as well as its Docs and Spreadsheet. Wave could include anything from text, link and photo. The product was released with an API for developers that could be turned off whenever needed.

Google has been deeply involved in producing media technologies and several features in Wave are ideal for social media applications. They could carve a niche among the enterprise customers. Then why did Google decide against continuing the development of “Wave”.

At Techonomy conference today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt answered to queries for the reason to halt Google Wave. From what could be interpreted Google’s policy was to keep on experimenting and learn from the failures. Halting the development of this real-time communication tool would not imply an end to the overall development. Schmidt was clear on the issue that Google would continue to develop on user interface and features of the product and incorporate in the new technologies. They would be using the best features  of Google Wave and develop a separate product.

Schmidt explains the Google’s policy mathematically: “A new product gets announced and gets a certain amount of traction. At some point, growth falls off the first wave of people finishes trying things out. Then, it begins to grow again. The first derivative of that second growth is a high and accurate predictor of what will happen.”

This is obviously true for certain products like BUZZ. With over 10 million followers BUZZ has grown into an inseparable application in Gmail. Google Docs was a completely successful venture by Googleplex men.

What remains to seen is Google’s reincarnated product with improved Google Wave features.