←back to thread

Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.434s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
Show context
BirAdam ◴[12 Oct 25 02:43 UTC] No.45554716[source]▶
Google Wave.

Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It sucks.

replies(13): >>45554837 #>>45554843 #>>45554892 #>>45554995 #>>45555111 #>>45556098 #>>45556279 #>>45556288 #>>45556513 #>>45556725 #>>45559672 #>>45560207 #>>45564011 #
1. brap ◴[12 Oct 25 08:43 UTC] No.45556513[source]▶
Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in hindsight you can tell it’s just not a very good product. They tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn’t work.

In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.