Saturday, Aug 7, 2010    Text size: 

In May 2009, the company launched Wave, a social networking collaboration tool which Google wanted to roll out into a singular monster service. It was supposed to have been “a new communication model” that was designed to merge email, instant messaging, phone blogs, wikis and more, according to Yahoo News.

But users didn’t respond much at all to the service.

"Our policy is we try things," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said. “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

Schmidt said that despite its lack of market success, Wave was a very clever product.

"We liked the (user interface) and we liked a lot of the new features in it (but) didn't get enough traction, so we are taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced. We'll get the benefit of Google Wave but it won't be as a separate product,” Schmidt said.

Many tech sites and analysts suggested that Wave was ahead of its time and that developers had a hard time understanding the context. It also didn’t help that Wave was one of the most complex technologies ever offered to the development community.