Google Wave Surfs Into the Sunset

It's dead, Jim. Google Wave, the much-hyped collaboration tool that Google released in beta form just about a year ago at its developer conference, is dead.

Admit it: there are plenty who think that everything Google touches turns to gold, but it's just not the case. In this case, Google said it simple enough in a blog post: not enough people were interested in Google Wave. Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow said:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product [...]

Wave was supposed to be a radically different way of communicating and collaborating. It's quite possible that users were confused. It wasn't exactly something anyone was used to. In fact, as Holzle said,

[...] we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication.

In fact, they didn't, which is why it's now dead. It's not completely dead, as pieces of it will live on, but as a product, it's gone.

If nothing else, we can see that Google knows when its time to dump a loser of an idea. They dumped the Nexus One a while back, and now this. No matter what, not every idea is a winner, not even an idea from Google.