#Wave back and say goodbye...

K, I just found out #GoogleWave has been demised last week, and found so many articles from top social and digital marketing communities stating that it was it's complexity that lead them to it's failure... and I just don't agree with them.

a) Google Wave is (or was) a whole new world for project collaboration, if it was difficult to understand then let us blame the lack of organization and process analysis that couldn't help people understand it's benefits... and it's still not that simple.

I'm pretty sure that 50% of users thought Wave was YASC (Yet Another Social Community), and at the end of the day when few of them kind of "found out" it was compromising what they've learnt after so many years to dominate... MAIL USAGE FOR INTERNAL OR PROJECT COMMUNICATION... they just got scared, their  "Mail-itis" ... that lack of ease of communication within internal processes that lead tons of businesses to base their follow ups by 100 mails per day... was now "simple" and easy to use.

Sorry guys, commodity is way to different than "lack of ease of use", so as we geeks say... the PEBKAC.

b) Instead of forgetting about Wave, Google should have been developing a business market strategy instead of a massive social one (thats their sin, the tool had a total different approach), where a few stages of training (mainly for Project Managers) could have seed some great potential evangelists with the right knowledge to guide the rest of the users population, locally and globally.

So is the case of Microsoft Project, that's not an easy tool to use, takes time to get the right idea and benefit (since management asks for time saving steps), but it's now one of the most used project management tools around the globe, you even have to pay for it ! specialization is NOT a failure fact, and as you can see with MS Project, complexity is not... time to time, Wave must have been promoted as the specialized tool it is, a simple strategy transforming the general "complex" feeling to the specialized one that it deserved.

c) Simplicity and ease of use Vs. Specialization and ease of communication.
If you ask me, Google stands for both concepts, while most of their services and tools are simple and easy to use, it's own nature and topic benefits were the ones that helped Google to achieve simplicity, adding specialization by enhancing bits and bytes (unlimited storage, online document revision, stable servers, simple UI's, AJAX implementation, etc...)... where there was already a process, Google pimped it and offered it the right way...

So what about Wave? 
Wave was exactly that!  and more, but project management is NOT common knowledge.
For those who really do management, they surely saw Wave's simplicity and ease of use (it maybe required some extra thinking in some parts, but thats any software's life process), and best of all, they really saw it was an specialized tool that REALLY HELPED AN EASED communication... it follows Google's mottos from A to Z...

So, the only lack for wave was from it's users, lack of knowledge, therefor lack of usage, if they didn't know the benefits, they couldn't find it useful, worst... they couldn't find it logical "what's about all this realtime writing? I wouldn't like people see my grammar or spelling mistakes before I check what I've wrote! What were you thinking Google!?"... LOL

Sad for Wave since the only bit that differed from all it's other apps was that it wasn't for ANY user... yet.

Wave wasn't a massive social tool, it was a "massive collaboration one"... and if you ask me, that is tons more difficult to achieve (and they did it), you can find this need all around the globe, from students to transnational managers, from family to friend groups... this time Google went 10 steps ahead, realizing about a need that users don't even know they have yet, and if some do, they are too confy with their mail-itis, I suppose that makes them feel they "work  A LOT"

We #wave back now and say goodbye, thinking that Google indeed #failed but just by stopping it's development (and their new image search service, but that's another story , and in spanish ;)