Yesterday brought the news that Google Wave was being killed. Announced with great fanfare a year ago and really only available for a couple of months, its demise was announced by Google as a kind of "we try a lot of things and some of them don't work out ... and we move on."

I applaud Google's willingness to try new things and accept that some of them, inevitably, will be failures, but I am struck by the fact that Wave failed.

I saw its launch at Google I/O and my first reaction was, "of course this is the way you'd design email if you were creating it today." Rich interactivity, ability to include video and photo collections, social connectivity fostering. Email today is trapped in a mid-70's format, text-based, with none of the technology developments (and the behavior capabilities fostered by those developments, e.g., shared photo collections) of the past 15 years well-integrated.

Nevertheless, Google Wave failed. Why?

My sense is that it got labelled as "email 2.0" which meant people had to figure out the transition from email 1.0 and gated Wave's adoption with a "let's figure out what we do with our current email and develop a transition plan." In other words, Google Wave got mired in the hairball of today rather than being something that could be adopted completely separately from anything already in place.

This is (once again) classic Clayton Christensen, with incremental improvements to existing products introduced by new players finding it nearly impossible to gain traction, while sui generis products introduced by new players and sold to a different market can find success. So in this sense, Google Wave wasn't different enough and couldn't escape being ensnared in what already existed. Contrast this with, say, Facebook, for which there was no existing institutional equivalent within which to get trapped -- Facebook has achieved skyrocketing success.

What does this mean for cloud computing? For me, Google Wave illustrates the potential danger private cloud initiatives face. While everyone recognizes the immense improvement cloud computing offers vis a vis existing practices -- after all, who wants to stick with manual processes that take weeks or months to get a new server provisioned? -- IT organizations face a real challenge if they attempt to graft a cloud initiative onto what they've already got in place. Then the revolution of cloud computing gets tangled in all of the other, more tactical initiatives, that IT operations has going on -- with the potential that the cloud initiative gets gated by the "we need to upgrade the switches, which depends on installing the new NICs," etc., etc.

A lot of IT organizations are attempting to deal with this by carving out a section of their data center to be their private cloud -- to leave most of what's in place alone and create an island of agile, elastic computing for new applications. This is far better than gating cloud computing by every other data center-wide initiative, but I wonder how this will ultimately end up working out -- will it suffer the Google Wave "not different enough to be handled completely separately but too much like what we've got to escape being integrated into that hairball"?

I'm not sure, but I found the Google Wave saga extremely illuminating. Looking at it as a demo, it is clear how much it offered; looked at as email 2.0, it suffered from all of the "yeah, it's better, but how do I make the move to it, how do I move my existing email to it, how do I get everyone up on it, etc., etc., etc." It foundered, perhaps, on being too different from what was already in place, but not different enough to stand on its own and be adopted as something new.

• Bernard Golden's blog
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