What Email Would Look Like If Invented Today

The world it was born into

By 2009 email was nearly forty years old, and its limitations were widely felt. Messages piled up in long threads full of quoted replies. Attachments multiplied into versions. Chat had appeared as a separate tool, and documents were shared by sending files back and forth. Each was good at something, and none worked smoothly with the others. Google itself ran Gmail, one of the most successful email services, and Google Docs, an early web-based office suite.

In Sydney, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who had built the product that became Google Maps, asked a provocative question: what would email look like if it were invented today?

The bet

Their answer was Wave. A “wave” was both a conversation and a document. Several people could edit it at once, and each could see the others typing, character by character. Replies could be inserted anywhere. A playback feature let latecomers see how a wave had evolved. Developers could add robots and gadgets, small programs that took part in waves. And the protocol was meant to be open, so that anyone could run a Wave server, as anyone can run an email server.

Google unveiled Wave at its developer conference on 28 May 2009 with a demonstration that ran well over an hour and drew a standing ovation. An invitation-only preview began in September 2009, with about 100,000 invitations, and Wave opened to everyone in May 2010.

Why it made sense

The diagnosis was correct. Email, chat and documents were fragmented, and real-time collaboration was clearly the future. The technical team was exceptional, the underlying collaboration technology was strong, and the commitment to an open, federated protocol was principled. Google had the distribution to reach millions of people.

How it lost

The excitement did not translate into use. Three problems compounded.

First, users struggled to say what Wave was for. It could replace email, chat and documents, which meant it was not obviously better than any of them for a specific job. People adopt tools to do something they already need to do; Wave’s breadth made that hard.

Second, network effects worked against it. A communication tool is worthless if the people you communicate with are not on it. The invitation-only preview, modelled on Gmail’s successful launch, meant that most early users could not bring their colleagues. Gmail had been useful to a single person from day one; Wave was not.

Third, it could be overwhelming. Seeing others type in real time, unfamiliar structures and the browser performance of the time made many users’ first experience confusing.

On 4 August 2010, about fifteen months after the unveiling, Google announced that it would stop developing Wave as a standalone product. It was shut down in 2012, and the code was handed to the Apache Software Foundation.

Explaining both the same way

Wave is often explained as a product that was too complicated, and email’s survival as the triumph of simplicity. A symmetrical account looks at what each was competing on. Email was not simpler in any absolute sense; it was familiar, universal and federated. Everyone had it, everyone understood it and anyone could write to anyone. Wave was better on several dimensions, but its value depended on everyone moving together, and it offered no path from the network everyone was on to the one it proposed.

Meanwhile, its best idea, real-time collaborative editing, succeeded once it was placed inside a tool with a clear job: writing documents together. Google Docs adopted the collaboration technology and became the vehicle Wave had not been.

What the loss teaches

Wave’s lesson is about vehicles. The idea, real-time collaboration around shared objects, was right and became ubiquitous. The vehicle, a new universal communication form launched by invitation, was wrong for a product whose value depends on networks.

There is also a lesson about ending products. Google’s quick decision limited its losses, but users who had committed to Wave were left with little recourse. Repeated product closures can teach users to wait before adopting anything new, which raises the cost of every future launch.

Sources and limitations

This account relies on Google’s announcements, the 2009 keynote and widely reported details of the preview. The number of invitations is as reported at the time. Assessments of why Wave failed come from contemporary commentary and later reflections; participants have offered different emphases. The statement that Wave’s collaboration technology carried into Google Docs reflects Google’s own description of reusing the technology.