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217 points · 200 comments · geoffbp

btown · 1791059919 · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
<a href="https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850
<a href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berlin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...
We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.
Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.
Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!
Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.
1. lucideer · 1791063508 · focus · HN ↗
  The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.
  Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.
  One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.
  1. switchbak · 1791063877 · focus · HN ↗
    Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.
    reilly3000 · 1791065375 · focus · HN ↗
    Consider if they had focused on it instead of Android. Maybe we would still have Windows phones. Such are the tides of time. I think their present, malignant glory eclipses it financially but never will romantically.
    pjmlp · 1791116685 · focus · HN ↗
    Loss of Windows Phone is sadly Microsoft's own doing.
    They were around 10% in Europe when they ramped down everything.
    It was the option for those unable to buy iPhones, and not willing to use Android as alternative.
    However we had the whole mess with Windows 7 to 8.0 being a full reboot for devs, 8.0 to 8.1 being a reboot, 8.1 to 10 yet again, which naturally meant no one cared with quality apps as well.
    goalieca · 1791067602 · focus · HN ↗
    Wave was a cool tech demo, and I was excited to see it. The teaser video was solid marketing. Me and my lab mates couldn’t figure out what use case it solved though.
    Google+ was pure garbage being shoved down our throats. That was a huuuge signal that Google had changed.
    vrc · 1791068189 · focus · HN ↗
    They boldly claimed they'd beat Facebook in 100 days and began acquiring any startup that pretended to solve a social problem. Every team got a G+ OKR. In classic Google fashion, they chewed up the one social platform they had, Orkut, and gChat, which was filling the AIM void, also squandered its lead as it was subsumed. They never invested enough in their successful/functional video chat, and instead just had team after team launching new versions of the same damn thing. Looking through GCP and their AI/Vertex/Whatever naming soup, not much has changed.
    lucideer · 1791118390 · focus · HN ↗
    Wave was very simply modern email. Conceptually, there's nothing more to it. It was a new protocol that effectively filled the same basic needs as email, but left room for first class support for the types of features we've either hacked badly on top of email or still lack today - proper threading, traceable message amendment, rich messaging & multimedia support that's not a MIME hack & an improved security posture.
    I think that was maybe a secondary problem with Wave: it was marketed as some new voodoo that ended up smelling like a hammer seeking a nail, when it was really just Email 2.0
    drcongo · 1791128205 · focus · HN ↗
    I think this might actually be the first time I've understood that intention. Fully in agreement with your earlier comment that it was a total turd of a product - I remember a group of friends all getting access, playing with it for about 30 minutes, and then just coming away thinking what an awful experience it was, never to return. None of us were thinking of it as even vaguely email related, it basically felt like forums but worse. Or messaging but worse.
  2. stackghost · 1791066510 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.
    Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.
    Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.
    al_borland · 1791068505 · focus · HN ↗
    When you have nothing, risk is cheap. Once you make it, the strategy tends to shift from growth to protection.
    david38 · 1791091882 · focus · HN ↗
    You can’t be serious? AWS blows kindle out of the water in complexity and impact. Basic AWS started in 2006, Kindle in 2007.
    The number of products under the AWS that are more impactful to society and more profitable to Amazon is vast.
    ceejayoz · 1791115846 · focus · HN ↗
    The word used was "innovative", though.
    esafak · 1791131115 · focus · HN ↗
    Who offered IaaS and PaaS before AWS?? That is revolutionary.
    ceejayoz · 1791131316 · focus · HN ↗
    "Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle."
    That was in 2007; S3 and EC2 were in 2006. The pace of innovation at AWS has declined, which is partially to be expected as it matures.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Temple" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Temple probably counts, too. They had auto-provisioned VPSes long before EC2. I'd also count VMware ESX.
    riffraff · 1791118465 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would it be a consequence of being publicly traded? Apple has less concentrated ownership than Facebook or Google and has been far better at developing novel products.
  3. al_borland · 1791068213 · focus · HN ↗
    I think releasing Wave as its own product, via private beta, was a mistake. If they wanted to reinvent email, they should have done it with Gmail, similar to what Apple did with iMessage.
    Gmail could operate as it always has, being an email client that integrates with every other email client. But when a Gmail user emails another Gmail user (or a group of them), have the thread automatically turn into a Wave, with everything that entails. This gets the new features where people already are, creates an incentive for people to move their email to Gmail, and doesn’t create yet another inbox for a person to manage.
    I always saw Wave as a business failure, not an engineering one, for this reason.
    toomuchtodo · 1791072498 · focus · HN ↗
    Great comment. Why Meta could ship Muse but Google could not.
    What Meta got right with Muse - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946526">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946526 - October 2026
    lucideer · 1791096468 · focus · HN ↗
    This would've been great but given what they came out with on a greenfield project, I strongly suspect an in-Gmail approach would have ended up qualitatively worse from UX & design perspective, likely driving users away from Gmail as a whole, & not just Wave. It would've resulted in a backlash from the mainstream, rather than Wave which was simply a damp squib the mainstream mainly ignored.
    In an ideal world you're right, but I still think it was an engineering failure as, theoretically, it should be easier to make something usable on a greenfield project, & it was a horrific mess.
    btown · 1791128836 · focus · HN ↗
    It was the type of product that was an engineering impossibility to launch at the time. Mobile browsers of the time (and many users' desktop browsers!) couldn't run JS quickly enough to allow for the real-time experience - and reportedly Wave would consume 300-500 MB of RAM at the time, which was a ton for 2009!
    <a href="https://theappslab.com/2009/10/05/google-wave-the-aftermath/" rel="nofollow">https://theappslab.com/2009/10/05/google-wave-the-aftermath/
    So they would have needed to invest in native mobile apps, and in significant levels of optimization. And none of this, not web or mobile, had the developer experience necessary to iterate quickly enough as the UI would inevitably evolve upon contact with customers, and you'd end up having many widgets reflecting a centralized global state.
    Not to mention that you needed sticky server-side sessions to run the operational transformations efficiently, which harkens to the KV caching challenges that still challenge us today.
    But it was an incredible dream, and it was a key source of inspiration to me to choose CS as a path.
    paradox460 · 1791131765 · focus · HN ↗
    They tried that with buzz. It flopped even harder
    al_borland · 1791133795 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn’t remember Buzz, so I looked up a video about it. It looks more like a social network than an evolution of email. I think that was the issue there. They tried to shove social networking into email. I don’t know about anyone else, but I always wanted social networks to be an island, especially in that era. The social contract and expectations with email are different from social networking.
    eszed · 1791173144 · focus · HN ↗
    Huge mistake! I loved Wave, and used it very successfully on one creative project. When I tried again, with some of the same people, we'd collectively burned all of our invite tokens and couldn't get any more, so we had to revert to emailing things back and forth so the new folks weren't kept out of the loop. That killed it, as far as any of us were concerned. I think I used it one more time, to plan a party or something with my sister, and never again. Integrating it into Gmail, as you suggest, would have been a better path, but hardly necessary. It was great as a stand-alone product, but destroyed itself because the damn invite system stopped the network effect cold.
  4. [deleted] · 1791074289 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  5. pjmlp · 1791109310 · focus · HN ↗
    Having gone through AOSP source code multiple times in the past, I really ask myself where those top engineers that make it through Google's famous hiring practices land.
    The way they code Java, the C style C++ in some parts, the Android Studio stable releases that are always as buggy as preview releases (to the point of becoming a meme among Android devs), and so on.
    palata · 1791137698 · focus · HN ↗
    > I really ask myself where those top engineers that make it through Google's famous hiring practices land.
    Can I question the quality of said hiring practices?
    I have been rejected for a project that was starting from scratch on something exactly like I had been building for 6 years at a competitor, based on such famous hiring practices (not at Google though). I was literally more experienced than the whole team on what they were building.
    Because you hire people who are really good at leetcode doesn't necessarily mean that you always get the best candidates for the job?
    pjmlp · 1791147048 · focus · HN ↗
    Personally, I think we as a community should all question that theater.
  6. mycall · 1791126603 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you think someone, given enough work, could vibe code another Wave product but better? Where is the desire to do that?

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