What Can We Learn From Google Wave?

Lately, there has been considerable buzz around Google ending its attempts to make Google Wave a workable standalone product. I read a very interesting blog on this by T. J. Keitt, Google Ends Wave: What Lessons Collaboration Tech Product Managers And Marketers Can Learn, and would like to share with you my main takeaways from it.

The news is not very shocking given that in the past Google has had “less-than-stellar” product launches (for example, Google Buzz). Furthermore, given Google’s high profile, any of its under-performing products ends up attracting a lot of media attention, making it seem bigger than it is. At the end of the day, this doesn’t really hinder Google’s innovation process and its engineers keep rolling out products. This is because Google encourages its employees to come up with bold ideas, take the risk and turn them into working models. So, Google Wave’s failure will do little to nothing in scarring the corporate giant.

However, one could argue that Google is still new to the collaboration workspace business; it threw a product out into the market without thinking through it thoroughly. Like many competitors in the collaboration software business, Google was not aiming to present a brand new collaboration platform; what it was doing was proposing a “revolutionary way” for people to work together. In doing so, what are some things that Google could have done differently? What does this story have in store for those of us in the expansion stage software business?

When positioning your product, be clear about what your product does: When Google Wave first came out, people were not sure about what it was replacing – Was it replacing email? Instant messaging? Web conferencing? There was no clarity around what its ultimate goal was. Yes, it was bundling together pre-existing solutions like Google Docs, Gmail, etc. offering real-time communication, document sharing and so forth, which a lot of its competitors did. The question for product managers and marketers still remained, was Google Wave a truly disruptive technology or was it just a complement to Google’s existing tools? Whichever it is, it should have been made known from the get-go and the product should have been positioned accordingly.
Don’t rely on users to develop your use cases: In addition to the lack of competitive positioning, Google never told its consumers what they are supposed to do with Google Wave. If you’re suggesting a new way of doing something, you have to state how to work in that new way. If you don’t express your use case clearly, you will be left waiting for customers to tell you what they have done with it. This means that you’re not driving your marketing efforts effectively; all you are doing is waiting for the market to figure out how it wants to define your product and then how it wants to accept it in the way that it wants to. So, as Google found, “you end up with a small pool of enthusiastic, imaginative users but a largely apathetic addressable market that never really got your point and that have lost interest by the time you collect initial use cases.” Thus, if you have a ground-breaking collaboration software, show your consumer how it relieves them from their current pain points, how it will make their lives easier, and how it is better compared to other competitors in the market.

It is hard to divert users from tools they are already comfortable using: Besides email and calendars, consumers rarely ever use the other tools in the collaboration software toolkit. This is the 9x email problem: consumers have a tendency of sticking with old technology, not because it makes sense for them to, nor because it improves their efficiency levels, but because they are more comfortable with it. Even though Google Wave might be a better technology, do consumers really want “a new way to work” or are they just looking for “the way they work to be a little better?” Product managers and marketers of collaboration software businesses need to keep this in mind, so they can incorporate this in how they market their products and cater to each of their target segment’s specific needs.