"Now, I don't mean to imply that Wave did not have some very smart engineers working on the UI, we certainly did. But talent is different from experience. The latter is a guard against 3.5MB of compressed, minified, inlined Javascript. Against 6 minute compiles to see CSS changes in browser. Against giving up on IE support (at the time, over 60% of browser market share) because it was simply too difficult. Against Safari running out of memory as soon as Wave was opened on an iPad."
I wonder how much of the failure was this sort of thing vs just having a product that people didn't understand. (I definitely agree that if the UI had been simple and snappy it would have been better)
On the bright side, I feel pretty confident that some real startup will take the open sourced Wave technology and do something good...
> On the bright side, I feel pretty confident that some real startup will take the open sourced Wave technology and do something good...
I don't share your confidence. Making even trivial changes to the 350k lines of opensourced java takes a lot of time and a lot of skill. There are only ~5 part time developers working on it. I doubt that it will be useful anytime soon.
I agree, although if I had the chance I would change the protocol spec too.
The client-server protocol uses protobufs encoded over JSON, and the federation protocol uses protobufs encoded over XML, via an XMPP extension. As others have said, there weren't accepted standards for this stuff just a few years ago. Today, you could build whip something together reasonably easily using JSON and socket.io or something.
I wonder how much of the failure was this sort of thing vs just having a product that people didn't understand. (I definitely agree that if the UI had been simple and snappy it would have been better)
On the bright side, I feel pretty confident that some real startup will take the open sourced Wave technology and do something good...