In this blog (or hopefully a
series of them), i intend to write about the key lessons to be learned not only
from the tech products that failed in the past but also i intend to write a bit
about why products succeed as well. The motivation to write this comes directly
from my experience. I started my career with working on a large ecommerce
product, which was (at that time) supposed to be the biggest technology
application built entirely on Microsoft technology. Ok, the word
"biggest" in the past sentence has more or less an anecdotal
reference but the key point is that this project really struggled to find its
feet due to various reasons. I will talk more about my own experience in the
coming posts but to start off, i wanted to put a microscope on some of the
public products that bit the dust. Failures, like success, leaves a lot to be
learned from. My personal hypothesis is that most failures share similar
reasons that led to eventual results. As a series of this blog, i want to test
this hypothesis as well. I will try and bind my narrative to around 500 words
so (covering top 3-4 reasons) that it remains within the readability limits.
The first product that pick for analysis is Google Wave. The
reason I pick up this product is simply that i got to know a bit about this
product while reading the book "How Google works" and it is quite
fresh in my mind. As the book says- Google Wave as the creation of
Some reasons for its failure as I
researched as below-
Complicated
User Experience:
As this Quora article suggests,
In
retrospect, the lack of success of Google Wave was attributed among other
things to its complicated
user interface resulting in a product that was a bit like email, a bit like an
instant messenger and a bit like a wiki but ultimately couldn't do any of the
things really better than the existing solutions.
One of the studies even pointed that a celebrated Tech journalist
even wrote a 195 page manual on how to use Wave.
This fact that someone need to write a hefty manual explaining a
product alone would testify that Wave probably missed a trick or two in
designing a simpler application. It appeared that it was not only hard to use
but it was also perceived as hard to explain.
If we fast-forward to 2015,
companies are adopting unbundling as a product
strategy, which means that they are decoupling the features to make it
more usable or focused e.g. Facebook unbundling messenger from the core app. It
means that the world gets to value simpler, one feature app more than an app
doing too many things, which Google Wave tried to do.
Launched
with Lofty Expectations:
As this Mashable article suggests, The first lesson that
Google or any web application developer can learn from Google Wave is the
importance of managing expectations. Because the hype window started four
months before Wave actually launched, the idea of what Wave was easily exceeded
the reality. Phrases like "radically different approach to
communication" and "e-mail 2.0" were bandied around, along with
buzz-word laden phrases like "paradigm-shifting game-changer."
As I have experienced, when a
product is launched with much fanfare, it always runs the risk of being subdued
under its own expectations. This is something Intel observed when they launched
Pentium chip (more about it in later blogs) when one edge case bug resulted in
a loss of close to a half billion dollars majorly because of the marketing hype
preceding it.
Lack of
Extensions:
As one of the reasons cited in eweek- Google Wave was open
sourced and yet failed to catch on with developers. While SAP, Novell and
Salesforce.com all vowed to work with Wave, and there were a number of
extensions created, the support didn't match that of other Google projects, such
as Chrome, for which there are thousands of browser extensions. That's a big
killer.
As I explained in one of my earlier blogs, in
today’s tech era the successful products are more defined with a platform style
architecture where building a successful ecosystem of developers is the key.
The absence of incentives attracting enough developers timely impacted the
speed at which extensions were created and hence resultant user adoption.
No
Integration with Google Apps
Again a reason cited in one of the analysis- Google
proudly displayed Wave as its own entity. It would have been better served
attached to Google Apps similar to the way Google Buzz was tied to Gmail, with
Google suggesting users try it out for certain collaboration functions in
Google Docs or Sites.
Integration between products is one of the key problems faced with
most big sized tech. companies that typically have multiple products in its
portfolio. Big companies usually expands their portfolios by acquiring other
companies. Acquisitions usually have a negative engineering impact when it
becomes to integration because of conflicting architectures.
The book that I referred earlier- “How Google Works” described
Google Wave as an ahead of its time product. I politely disagree to this given
the fact that now, 5 years later, the world still doesn’t see a compelling
reason to have a product like this. To be fair to Google Wave and its superior
technology, Google did use the pieces of Wave platform in Google+ and Gmail.
But hearing Eric Schmidt say that Google liked the Wave UI represents a
sort of disconnect between what users felt and what management saw the product.
At the core, this aspect is something that’s common across most product
failures.
Please do share your thoughts,
ideas around this blog.
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