As you may have heard, Google Wave is dead. But why is it dead? Google CEO Eric Schmidt took some time today after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA to answer that.
When BBC reporter Maggie Shiels asked about the reasons behind the product’s demise, Schmidt noted that Google liked the UI and a lot of the technology behind the product, but it simply to take off. “We try things,” he said. “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,” he continued.
If something does hit, he noted that Google gets strongly behind it. That simply wasn’t the case here.
Schmidt also said that Google would be taking the technology behind Wave and applying it to technologies that they haven’t announced yet. Everyone believes this will be Google’s next big push into the social space (which executive Vic Gundotra will apparently be leading). He says the Wave guys are going to be working on things like Wave — but again, things that aren’t announced yet.
I followed up with a question about Buzz — Google’s other recently launched social tool. “The Buzz team is doing very well,” Schmidt said. But he noted that “we tend to lump Buzz into the Gmail success.” When I asked if Google considered attaching Wave with Gmail as well to bolster it, Schmidt replied that “there were a number of such ideas, yes.”
Watch the full video below.
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Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009. Google announced that they would discontinue new development on Google wave in August 2010 and that waves would no longer be visible after April 30, 2012. In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves.” Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a...
Google Buzz is a social network and sharing product built by Google. Based within Google Profiles, Buzz offers a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like†these items and you can comment on them. Updates from Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter can also be automatically imported into a Buzz stream. Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity. Buzz Features include: Buzz Online Auto-following: Buzz allows users can auto-follow...
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Since coming to Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Along with Larry and Sergey, Eric shares responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations. Eric’s Novell...
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