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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850

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.

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lucideer an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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al_borland a minute ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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switchbak an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.

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goalieca 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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reilly3000 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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stackghost 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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arianvanp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"