Google announced last week they will discontinue Wave by the end of the year. As it was for the Wave ecosystem and even its users, that was quite a shock for me. But after some thinking we can “almost” understand why it failed. Here are 6 main reasons why.

It seems that the “Release Early, Release Often” software philosophy was wrong on that one. Wave did not survive the hype. Slow, full of bugs and no real scenario or story to its users. Wave has lost a lot of users because of that initial launch.

Talk of a learning curve. Wave broke all the paradigms we were used to: email, forums, IM… Learning Wave was like discovering a complete new way of communicating. On that point, the KISS mentality was 100% right.

Wave (at his launch, a bit less now) was too much like a platform: they focused on a new protocol, they made a very slick API… But you can’t sell an OS without its applications. It took a long time for its users to find what to use Wave for. But even now no real breaktrough application has been developped. Compare that to the iPad “platform”, it already has killer apps.

No email notifications, no GTalk support, no integration with Spreadsheets / Docs… You can’t convert a user without bridging the gap with the tools he daily uses. So many waves I left unanswered because I was not aware of them.

Too much technology in a product. Wave started to push real time federation, drag and drop, heavy client javascript. Wave was like a sandbox where Google threw everything in. Our browsers weren’t ready for that. Their servers were apparently not ready as well. No doubt they will reuse all of those technos. At least Wave succeeded on that point.

There are rumors that Google is making a huge move against Facebook: “Google Me”. Those are pure speculations – but maybe they are leveraging every team they have on that. Hard to leave Wave’s dream team working alone? Maybe?

I am a bit ashamed to write those #Fail #Reasons… I loved the product. For me it was a real earthquake when they announced it last year, as it was last week. But we can be sure that Wave left its mark on the Web.

RIP Wave.

PS: Well now there is a movement for saving Google Wave…