Google Wave Pisses Me Off

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The hyptasticness that is Google Wave continues to annoy me as a Flash developer and RIA enthusiast. Now I preface all of this by admitting that I haven’t used it; maybe when I get an invite this thing will be worth all of the finger grease that keyboards have endured as people talk about it. And I’m not saying it’s not impressive; it is. It’s a great demo, it does some very cool stuff. I’m not annoyed at Google Wave, I’m annoyed because everything that people like about that demo was doable 3-5 years ago with Flash. Flash Remoting, Flash Communication Server, and our much better user interface capabilities pretty much could have created Google Wave. Now I understand that there’s some excitement because this is built on open standards with a more open model, but people don’t get excited about standards- they get exited about vision. And that’s what kills me.

I don’t care if you’re a Silverlight developer or a Flash developer; the technology platform you’ve got is years ahead of what Google Wave is built on. Yet with all of our UI prowess, our design sense, and our pure and simple technical superiority with things like real time communication and scalability we haven’t built very much that captures people’s imaginations the way that Google Wave has. I think we lack the vision.

I think it could be argued that in some cases we’re TOO visionary. If someone had actually built Google Wave 3-5 years ago it wouldn’t have made the same impact because people wouldn’t have realized what it meant. In the RIA world we live in the bubble of the future. I genuinely think that most of us look 3-5 years ahead because that’s where our technology puts us. When people don’t get what we’re trying to pitch we just move on to the next thing. Look at Augmented Reality. Possible with Flash for a couple of years now but it’s just starting to get some mainstream attention. RIA developers seem permanently entrenched in the Technology Trigger of the Hype Cycle and we don’t seem to be able to follow things through to the Plateau of Productivity.

Part of the Wave hypefest is probably because of the world’s love/hate relationship with Google. When they do something everyone goes nuts and that’s because they really do have the power to change the web. They did it once, they’re big, they’re smart, they can do it again. But there are a lot of smart people in the RIA world. Big companies like Microsoft and Adobe and small ones like Aviary and Picnik. We just don’t seem to encourage the visionary demos, the ones that make people rethink how they’ll communicate and interact. I don’t know if that has to come from the big companies directly or whether it’s something we can encourage startups to do. We don’t have a technology problem; if that was all it took we’d be cranking out Wave-esque demos all the time. We just don’t seem to be able to look at the entire scope of what we’ve been doing for the past couple of years and put it together in a game changing way.

I don’t have a solution, but if you’ve got suggestions, I’m all ears.

Related posts:

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  2. Flex and a Google Office Suite
  3. Google Docs == Fail but Google Docs + Adobe AIR == Win
  4. Google Print
  5. Google Serving up MP3 Flash Player in Gmail
  • Harry

    And Google Wave isn’t the first Google product to trigger the emotion: “We could have done it better on the Flash Platform years ago!”

    Why hasn’t anybody written a Gmail killer in Flex? Why hasn’t anybody writter a Google Reader killer in AIR? Why hasn’t anybody written a Google Calendar killer in Flex?

    Maybe we have a marketing problem. Maybe there are thousands of developers like me who are thinking: “I could write something better than Google Mail/Reader/Calendar/Wave”, but then we don’t because we don’t think we could make money doing it.

    So Adobe, let me know if you can provide a path for me to say: “OK I’ll do it!” and make it a financially sustainable venture.

    One suggestion is to take a look at what Apple has done. People with very basic programming skills are creating apps that revolutionize mobile development. You don’t have to know about software marketing and distribution and sales and customer acquisition, and yet you can make tons of money selling apple smartphone apps in high quantities at low price.

  • http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/ Joseph Labrecque

    It’s good to hear someone from Adobe speaking out on this. I think we’ve all seen the “looooong video” from Google demonstrating Wave. I, like many others (I hope!), were slightly confused by the amount of attention that this has caused. As stressed above, we’ve been able to do all this stuff for quite some time. These bits and pieces are nothing new to most Flash developers. I would expect most of us to be puzzled by the general reaction to Wave.

    I can only imagine that people are so enthused by this idea because of two things:

    1) While the features themselves are very ho-hum, one cannot deny that the vision behind the service is extremely ambitious. Bringing all these features together in such a defined ecosystem is impressive.

    2) Google is doing it. There are many, many Google fanatics out there in much the same way as there are Apple fanatics, Microsoft fanatics, and Adobe fanatics out there. The difference is that Google is absolutely everywhere, even to the casual computer user while these other entities are much more focused and specialized.

    I may receive death threats for this comparison, but Google has become sort of the Wal-mart of the internet.

  • http://markdarb.com/ Mark

    I for one wouldn’t dream of using such an app built in Flash or Silverlight. What use is a proprietary plugin that only works in select operating systems or browsers? It’s the sort of thing that kills the open-ness of the Internet. Much better to have open standards that anybody can implement than something really “cool” that a company has developed but that said company conveniently has complete control over and can use to bend users to its will. Wave is exciting not just because of its great features but because of their commitment to make it open and allow anyone to implement the protocol or host a server using Google’s own code. The more open HTML5-based solutions that pull away from the need for Flash the happier I’ll be.

  • http://www.munkiihouse.com Tony Fendall

    From where I sit (someone who works with a very large scale Flex app) the problem is more one of scale. Sure, we could have built wave in Flex, but there aren’t any Flex shops around who have the capacity to build something like that and get it off the ground.

    I heard once that having 10 Flex developers where I work makes us one of the larger Flex shops out there (Ryan can correct me if I’m wrong), but this pales in comparison to the development power that Google has…

  • http://broadcast.oreilly.com/brian-lesser/ Brian Lesser

    Hi Ryan,
    I don’t agree that Wave was doable years ago with FCS/Remoting/Flash. FCS did not have, and FMS still does not have, many of the core capabilities that are in Wave. FCS/FMS does not provide any of the core instant messaging features like user presence and federated messaging. By default FMS application instances are separate islands unto themselves. They can call out to application servers using remoting and XMLSockets and can connect to each other, but those are just communication channels. FMS is not like an XMPP server. There are no sever components to route messages between instances or servers and no higher level protocols to leverage. Wave clearly has those sort of features built in. But more important, Wave supports an XML document structure that can be simultaneously edited by multiple users in real time. FCS and FMS does not have that capability built in. FCS and FMS only support one shared data structure: shared objects. Shared objects are just independent slots (or buckets) that can be updated and synchronized across clients. I’ve read that Wave provides something similar for 3rd party developers, but at the core of Wave is something FCS/FMS never had: an operational transform. You can read about it here:

    http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform

    Google took work that originated at Xerox Research over a decade ago with the Jupiter real-time server and were able to come up with something that appears to work much better. Here’s the YouTube explanation:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ykZYKCK7AM

    So more to your point, why didn’t Macromedia and Adobe take the good running start they had with FCS back in 2002 and build something like Wave? I’m sure there are lots of reasons, but my favorite explanation is that Macromedia didn’t have the resources. FCS needed revenue and Macromedia found traction in Flash Video and later in Breeze. The result was that FCS remained terribly expensive and never got more advanced collaboration features. It morphed into a media server. The promise of the early communication components were abandoned and the server’s price drove Flash developers interested in RTC to build their own RTMP server (Red5). In simple terms it wasn’t a lack of vision, it was a lack of resources and perhaps a lack of audacity – things Google clearly has.

    Ultimately, I don’t know why Macromedia and Adobe made the decisions that they made. I do know that I have been lobbying for things like richer shared data structures for FMS for years. I’ve asked repeadely for shared arrays so people don’t have to worry about doing stuff like this:

    http://flash-communications.net/technotes/mappingSharedObjectsToArrays/index.html

    I’ve even mentioned the early work at Xerox and algorithms like the operational transform. Some folks at Macromedia and Adobe listened patiently but had other priorities.

    As for Google Wave itself, I think it is big deal. It’s much closer to how I’ve imagined the real-time Web than twitter or Adobe Connect. I posted some thoughts about that here before Wave was announced:

    http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-real-time-web.html

    So good for Google! They have truly done something audacious and are bringing what looks like wonderful new capabilities to the Web. What should Adobe do now? My suggestion is that you embrace what Google has done. If Google really makes Wave open, I’d build the whole thing into FMS. But I don’t really expect that to happen either – it would be a big project. And, I think Adobe has other priorities.

    Since you asked for suggestions, I really think Adobe needs to do something about RTC shared models and components across its entire product line. The shared record set features (data services) in LiveCycle should also be in FMS and fully licensed in ColdFusion. Developers should be able to choose shared objects, shared record sets, and or operational transform as needed – in any of Adobe’s servers. If you want to be a big part of the real-time Web you need to do something audacious across your offerings and end the product and licensing fragmentation you have now. That would be a start.

    Yours truly,
    -Brian

  • Mike Hazard

    Hi Ryan,

    Yes, anything Google does makes news and yes much of it is overhyped. However, a lot of what Google releases is free for personal use. I think that’s important. Of course someone could have built Wave in Flex/Flash/Silverlight, but would it be free? Acrobat.com is nice and all, but I don’t think I could convince the people I work with to pay for it. They’re content with Google apps, especially because they don’t pay a dime for it. They’re happy to give up “rich” in order to save a few dollars.

    I should also say that part of the reason that tools like Wave and Google Apps never took off on the Flash platform is because Adobe set the cost of entry way too high. FMS, Remoting, Flex and so forth were just too damn expensive. Add in a weak set of development tools and a proprietary system and its little wonder why developers didn’t pay much attention. Once Adobe made Flex free, developers (and corporations) started considering it.

    Perhaps Adobe is TOO visionary (as you state), or perhaps you haven’t learned how to price your software. Or perhaps a little of both?

  • ryanstewart

    Sorry about the delay guys, I just got back from dinner.

    @Harry, I think the economics are huge and I wanted to mention that. Flex/Flash developers are getting paid a lot of money to create a specific kind of app. There just isn’t the incentive for an individual developer or a team of developers to work on a project like Wave.

    @Joseph, the Google cachet is clearly a big deal. Which is why I think Adobe and Microsoft need to step up the “visionary demo” and start blowing people’s minds.

    @Mark, I get the openness excitement of Google Wave, and I see why that’s compelling for developers. But again, this was something that blew the mainstream away. Those people don’t care about standards and openness. Leaving that aside, I want to see more RIAs that start impacting how the mainstream see the web.

    @Tony, yup, I concede the economics of it. I don’t know if you’re one of the bigger Flex shops with 10 people at this point, but that probably would have been the case a couple of years ago.

    @Brian, fantastic comment. One of the best I’ve had on this blog. I think Adobe has made a lot of progress since the days of FCS with a combination of LiveCycle Data Services and FMS and services like Adobe Flash Collaboration Services.

    I’m reading the Operational Transform document right now and you’re right (as far as I know) we don’t have that. And I think the resources do play a big part. Frankly, I think with the exception of some teams (Flash Player being an example) Google has smarter and geekier engineers than Adobe does.

    Does that hinder us from creating a fundamentally breakthrough technology? Maybe, but I think we’ve done an admirable job of that. Google’s beauty was exposing a disparate number of technologies in a single stack and creating a demo on top of it. I want us to see us do a better job of *that* with the technologies we have.

    That (hopefully) means we can get more resources to geek out and think about hard problems like concurrent editing of a single document.

    Thanks a ton to everyone who commented.

    =Ryan
    ryan@adobe.com

  • http://xsive.co.nz Campbell

    I was on the beta (think I can say that without breaking NDA) and I was pretty unimpressed with the UI. The concept as a whole has vision though, and I quickly found that having no friends on the beta limited the idea of waves. Now with people actually using it, it might pick up.

    I think you hit an important example with Aviary though. Aviary in itself is amazing. Simply stunning in what they have created. But I don’t know if its the lack of exposure to non-techy types, lack of the “wow googles going to change the world with…” but yes the path to mass exposure is a long one.
    I am unsure if things like Aviary are ahead of their time, though it certainly would explain a lot. Perhaps you could chat to them and summarize some of the common thoughts of these people/companies.

    Also I guess what we have to remember is we (as developers) have grunty machines, fast internet etc… Were definitely not the norm, and even you experienced what New Zealand (where I am) has for internet speeds (its not that uncommon in the rest of the world either). But this may be a mute point as even wave was sloooow for me.

  • http://imagine-it.org Pamela Fox

    Just my 2 cents, as a Googler.

    The thing that excites me about Wave isn’t the realtime-ness – it’s the platform. I love the idea of robots and gadgets that can help us automate communication. Since I spend most of my life responding to emails and forum posts, I know how desperately I could benefit from it.

    I don’t think the hype is around the extensions story, but that’s my personal motivation. :)

  • ryanstewart

    @Mike, an excellent point. I know we spend a lot of time pricing our products, so I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but Google does a very good job of providing services that tie back to their core market and make them money.

    It’s something we haven’t been able to pull off yet, and I think you’re right, we price some of our more cutting edge technology out of the reach of average developers.

    That’s not something we’ll change overnight, but I think there are forces working in a direction to make our stuff cheaper.

    =Ryan

  • ryanstewart

    @Campbell, I think figuring out how to get buzz with what I consider the mainstream tech is important. I can’t figure out why Aviary doesn’t get more attention; what they’ve got is AWESOME. But it seems to get no buzz. Maybe because they’re a startup? Maybe they’re too far ahead? Maybe I have a warped sense of what’s cool.

    @Pamela, I think the “platform” discussion is important, but different. I can absolutely see why developers would love Wave. But I can’t see why it got so much attention. Is it because developers loved it? Does that trickle up?

    I can believe that developer love trickles up but I think Wave had both developers drooling and other techies drooling for different reasons. But maybe not, maybe it really is just about making sure developers of all stripes have cool stuff to play with.

    =Ryan

  • http://flex.joshmcdonald.info/ Josh McDonald

    I think the main problem holding back other people creating things like Wave is that only the Adobes, Microsofts, and Googles of the world can afford to hire the Wave team for two years (although I’m sure it didn’t start as large as it is now), to build something that is not going to generate direct revenue, and none at all for some time yet.

    None of us can sell that to our boss :)

  • http://www.adobe.com Mark Blair

    On the economics, Google’s in a very strong position of being able to monetize everything they produce through an advertising engine, this will no doubt include Wave. It’s a great model and allows them to take some risks with end user pricing, if a service takes off (such as GMail) then they have the option of introducing premium business models

  • http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/ Joseph Labrecque

    What a great set of comments.

    I’d like to add that Google Wave was the featured story on cnn.com for most of the day, today. There is always the problem of news reporters picking and choosing what qualifies as “print-worthy”. I see this all the time: a great story is passed up for something that the news people think is what people want to read about.

    That’s why projects like Aviary don’t generate the same sort of excitement to anyone outside the community. News organizations report on what they understand to be news. Anything they don’t understand, isn’t gonna get the same sort of coverage.

  • http://arpitonline.com/blog arpit

    Hi Ryan,
    I think Wave as a technology is different from Wave the product. Technically everything Wave does could be done with some XMPP servers powering a real time wiki or something like that. I think to Google’s credit, they applied the tech to an interesting problem. I am no Google fanboy and find most of their applications boring, but Wave excites me for a number of reasons.

    It was a good observation is that a lot of communication we do on the web is fairly similar but fragmented. We have conventionally considered things like blog posts, twitter feeds, emails, collaborative document sharing to be different things, but are they really? Arent we all manipulating a basic content document. Can one interface serve all the needs? Consider that you run a group of Flex developers. If you announce the new event, do u post to the google group there and wait for replies, or post a message on the group blog and wait for comments, or tweet it and wait for @replies? Usually I do all of them and it seems really silly (more so since I saw the GWave demo). Its kind of interesting to see a tool that *could* change that.

    Whether Google will really succeed remains to be seen. I think Jeff Atwood phrased GWave as not only technically hard built on this elaborate stack, but also conceptually hard. Could I get my mom to use it, no way. But maybe it’ll take our generation before it becomes a new standard for web communication.

    Regarding FMS/FlashCom, it was definitely a vision thing. I worked with FlashCom back in the day making some real time apps for higher learning but the pricing was too steep. Plus noone had any idea besides some interesting real time games on what to do with it. Later it seemed to be geared only towards video before becoming FMS. I am not sure if the server side actionscript it used ever even moved to AS3

  • http://arpitonline.com/blog arpit

    Sorry I misspoke. It wasnt Jeff Atwood who made the “conceptually complex” statement, it was John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/05/30/google-wave

  • http://www.erikyuzwa.com eyuzwa

    Of course..

    Similar to the sudden explosion that we had around AJAX…turns out it was there all along buried in the vaults of the Javascript Gods..

    I love Flash, but there’s no money in it. Everyone around the world has made the mental assocation that “Flash == FREE”.

  • please don’t

    Honestly the fact that an Adobe evangelist is this clueless pretty much answers its absence from the forefront of the web.

    Google wave’s innovation does not lie in the “rich interface” nor on the real time. Yes, those could be built on flash, but also on unity3d and C code, or anything really.

    It’s values lie on the server federation protocol, on transformations, on the well thought architecture. Then all backup by free standarts with sample code on decent programming languages.

    FlashCom and friends are a joke, please. The control panel is written in flash for crist sake. You administer a server through a flash gui. It does nt get any worse than that. Besides : no federation, expensive, proprietary and programmed in as1.

    Adobe (nor macromedia for that matter) have ever created a compelling product on the server side, it’s really outside of its core competence (GUI, graphics).

  • Mike Hazard

    Back to the subject of why Google gets so much press…I think journalists have a tendency to categorize the world as Microsoft and Not-Microsoft, and Google is perhaps the first company that can “beat” MS. This is especially true of more mainstream media like CNN. It’s a lot easier to write stories about two tech giants going head-to-head than it is to write a story about a company like Aviary. Google vs. Microsoft is something my mother could follow. A story about a cool online vector editor isn’t. Of course, this doesn’t excuse more tech-centric outlets from not writing stories about companies like Aviary (which is why I miss your blog on ZDNET).

    Now on to another topic while I have your attention. :)

    It’s sorta funny. The biggest problem I have with Google is the same problem I have with Adobe, and that is neither company seems to have long term vision for their technologies. While I’m sure both Adobe and Google have internal documents with nifty titles like “Adobe’s Vision for a Rich Future” and “Google Online Apps: Our Vision for an Online, Ad Supported Future”, neither company does a particularly good job expressing their vision for their technology.

    Add to that the fact that both companies seem to be almost schizophrenic in terms of their products, and it’s getting difficult for developers like myself to blindly follow their lead. For example, Google releases so many tools/features/apps with a beta stamp on them that it’s become a joke. Hell, about the only thing not stamped beta is the Google.com homepage (btw, it would be a funny “in” joke if they redesigned their logo with the word beta in it). It’s hard to tell where they’re going with their solutions, or if some of the stuff will even be around a year from now. It certainly doesn’t instill confidence in the average CIO.

    On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if the various Adobe business units even talk to each other. Seriously, from the outside it looks as if the Livecycle group is heading off in one direction, the Flex team in another, etc. The Creative Suite team seems to be charged with simply pushing out the next revision of the suite every 18 months and the CF group is left scratching their heads asking themselves how they can produce a new version that seems to be integrating some of the buzz-worthy stuff other groups are working on. It’s led to such things in CF as Flash forms and in the Creative Suite embarrassingly limited integration between CS applications (let alone between the other units such as Livecycle, CF, Flex, etc.). It’s hard to see a coherent vision here.

    I know I’d feel much better if I heard a clear and detailed statement of direction from Adobe. The knowledge that creating a full, integrated set of solutions is important to Adobe (and supplying details on how you plan to get there) would be far more impressive than the demos and flashy stuff we’ll see next week.

    As a developer I’m jealous of the MS ecosystem in some ways. Regardless of what one may think of the quality of their solutions or their business tactics, you can’t deny MS offers a fairly focused and integrated set of solutions. Yes, you have to become Ballmer’s bitch, but in return you get a pretty impressive set of technologies. I know, I know, MS’s vision is to enslave us all and stuff their corporate pockets, but at least they have a vision. :)

  • Bjorn Schultheiss

    I was having the same discussion with others yesterday.

    One point we discussed that I haven’t seen mentioned is that a lot of non-developers are excited about Wave.

    Not everyone understands technically whats on the table with Wave but what they did see is an example of E-mail as we know it re-defined.

    This program if successful could probably rival their other programs in terms of “user-dependence”.

    Good luck to them.

    I probably could have built this myself in Flash 3 years ago, but I think it would take a company the scale of Google to pull off this lofty ambition.

  • http://rmd.com.au Rob

    Google Wave can display HTML. Flash still can’t.

  • http://lazycoder.com Scott Koon

    Honestly? The same reason that Microsoft doesn’t put together products like Wave even though they could have using ActiveX years ago and that Sun doesn’t even though it could have been a Java applet.

    Adobe is, first and formost, a tools company. You build tools and put them out there. The question you should be asking Adobe is: Why hasn’t Adobe built something like Wave into Adobe Photoshop or Dreamweaver? How does something like Wave or GMail built in Flex/Flash promote the bottom line of tool sales? Anything Google can do to increase traffic to their .com domain helps their ad sales, whether they are serving ads or just gathering mindshare.

  • http://twitter.com/pooran Pooran

    Its isn’t that what they developed cannot be done using any other tech.. it is about the way addresses the communication between people.

    If you keep the techrant aside, you will see the idea it manifests. Its one beutiful product!

  • iPhone App Developer

    @Harry — “You don’t have to know about software marketing and distribution and sales and customer acquisition, and yet you can make tons of money selling apple smartphone apps in high quantities at low price.”

    That’s the hype Apple would have you believe. The reality is that developing iPhone apps is kind of being in a rock band — 1% hit it big, 9% keep at it for a while and learn to make a decent living, 90% try for a while, bank a pittance, and then give up. The market is so oversaturated at this point that it’s hard to really succeed.

    An example — my company has an app out there that has been ranked around 10th to 15th in sales in the reference section of the app store for the last six months. It makes us about $100-$150 a day. Another game hit #6 game in the UK at its peak — resulting in about $300-$400/day in sales for a couple of weeks before dropping down.

    Anyway, I know that’s not the main topic of this post, but I somehow always feel the need to correct that misconception. :)

  • http://www.mkmultimedia.net/blog MK

    Excellent topic, Ryan.

    The tagline of flowplayer.org says a lot: “The only real reason to use Flash on your site”. Of course I think this is an absurd tagline and disagree with it, but it does accurately reflect the majority of non-flash devs I know attitude towards Flash.

    I just watched about 50 java devs ooh and ahh over a YUI data grid that doesn’t hold a candle to Flex’s Advanced DataGrid of 2 years ago – but they don’t even know that!(bad marketing??) They relish that they can now do what used to take Flash to do, precisely because it is with open standards-based tools they understand how to markup, deploy, unit test, QA, debug, make wrappers, frameworks, templates etc… and do it quickly.

    They finally feel the joy, empowerment and expressiveness we felt 7 years ago. I even hear them using the word “expressiveness”!

    -mk

  • http://imagine-it.org Pamela Fox

    It’s funny, this comments thread also points out one of the powers of Wave – nested comment reply. (And yeah, it’s not new, but that plus real-time is, as far as I know).

    Have you thought about attempting a Flash-based Wave Client, to prove that Flash is just as capable?

    I think that we (Google) happened to push the HTML5 angle of it, but I don’t see that it’s dependent on HTML5 for it’s coolness factor.

  • JulesLt

    There’s a lot of people out there who have been critical of Wave, and I think it’s similar to some of the ideas in the new Opera – anything that needs a video to explain it, rather than 10 seconds of pitch, is going to be a hard sell.

    Also, it has to be said that the more complex the interface, the less ‘good’ Google are at doing the job – it’s interesting to compare Apple’s Google Maps app with Google’s Google Maps on Android, fo instance.

    And speaking of which – “You don’t have to know about software marketing and distribution and sales and customer acquisition, and yet you can make tons of money selling apple smartphone apps in high quantities at low price.”

    I’d say that is not true, and something iPhone developers are beginning to discover. Unless you are in the Top 10 – which, as with music, has a natural marketing effect in itself, you do need to know about marketing to get your product to stand out amongst the 70,000 odd out there.

    Back to Ryan’s piece – while Flash could do a lot of this 3-5 years ago, the reason we turned to Flash was largely because browsers couldn’t – and IE still can’t – but personally, I don’t have any particular emotional tie to Flash – my team come from a Java background, and mostly have been pre-Java experience too, rather than being Flash developers.

    As a Mac user who works on PCs, I also frequently find myself thinking things like ‘but you could do that 5 years ago on a Mac’ when looking at Windows 7 – but that is not the point – history counts for little in technology.

    And Google are good at getting people excited about there stuff – even when it is ‘me too’ or inferior – I think one of the commenters was correct in noting that for a lot of people the story is now ‘Microsoft vs Google’ – as much as it was once ‘Microsoft vs Apple’ and ‘Google vs Yahoo’.

  • http://www.barefootmobile.com/blogs/blinky/ Emanuele Cipolloni

    No Ryan, I don’t think it could be made 3-5 years ago in Flash, in fact it can’t be made even today. Just check the fact that in Wave you can drag and drop native objects (like pictures) from the OS into the window, something not possible with Flash at all (I guess AIR doesn’t count here, as we are talking about web applications and not client installable ones, right?)

  • http://corlan.org Mihai Corlan

    @Mark

    I think you are not entirely right when you say “I for one wouldn’t dream of using such an app built in Flash or Silverlight. What use is a proprietary plugin that only works in select operating systems or browsers? It’s the sort of thing that kills the open-ness of the Internet.”

    I mean Google announced they will not support IE. This leaves you with only two options if you are on IE: not using Wave or install a plugin (Google Frame) or another browser.

    Disclaimer I work for Adobe.

  • Quantumplation

    -Note: I did not have the patience to read all the comments before mine, so if the point has been made already, I apologize-

    One thing you fail to account for in your argument, though valid, is that Flash still requires the install of a plugin. Google Wave is built on javascript, inherent in all browsers. Granted, this does not account for it’s hype, it’s simply something to dissuade the “This is all possible with Flash” attitude. It’s all possible with a desktop application even more so than flash.

    The second question I’d like to raise is: If this is “behind the times” and shouldn’t be generating this much hype because it’s not “revolutionary”, consider: Why was it never done before now if it’s so archaic? A large part of the hype stems from the fact that this is the first seamless and accessible integration of all the little different pieces that were possible. It’s the first time someone has seen the scissors, the knife, and the screwdriver tossed in the toolbox of the internet, and put them together into a swiss army knife.

    Finally, having used wave, I can say it’s phenomenal how different one’s mentality towards it is when compared before and after. I was excited to get my hands on it, to test it out, cause it looked nifty. However, after using it to collaborate on a project I’m working on, and realizing the revolutionary shifts in the paradigm of communication my mind had undergone due to having used wave, I realized why Google Wave seems to be so popular: In a world of disjointed communication between cellphones, email, twitter, Facebook, MSN, AIM, forums, and blogs, all with a near linear and temporal structuring, the communication possibilities that your mind starts exploring given a tool like wave are, frankly, surprising.

    I hope you’ll at least give wave a chance. I’m not saying it deserves the nearly god-send attitude it’s received, yet I do consider it revolutionary to my own mode of thought when approaching problems and communication, and has the unique potential to root itself in our society as a powerful new medium for the propagation of information.

  • http://broadcast.oreilly.com/brian-lesser/ Brian Lesser

    Hi Ryan,

    Another thing that was exciting back in 2002 with FCS and Flash was the ability to capture and stream a version of H.263 video from anyone who had the Flash player. Since then successive releases of the Flash player means we can now decode On2′s VP6 and h.264 video, but we’re still stuck with encoding h.263 in Flash. Why is that? I’ve heard various explanations ranging from the need to keep the player small to a lack of engineering resources. If player size is the problem, then Flash has a fundamental boundary that will slow Adobe down. That’s why I think Flash needs a new and more modular extension mechanism. (I think Sun is trying to do something related to this to break down the monster that is the JRE.) While a new modular extension mechanism is a risky idea it seems like the only way to be able to update the player in a way that will keep it competitive with things like Chrome (remember Google is buying On2). If you want to make full 3D, h.264 or VP 8 encoding/decoding available in Flash then I think you have to be willing to do more with the player itself. I also think a modular extension mechanism would provide a way third parties can contribute to the player without Adobe having to release all of it as open source.

    In that respect I thought the BBC’s coverage of Wave’s release for public trials was interesting – especially the video where Rory Cellan-Jones talks via video conferencing to Stephanie and Lars. It’s interesting because it doesn’t happen entirely in Wave. They used a video conference between two Google sites to get the immediacy of a person-to-person conversation.

    If Wave is lacking anything (at least for now) it is audio and video conferencing – though h.264 video chat is available in Gmail. Google’s attempt to purchase On2 may be part of solving that. It seems likely that Google will build VP8 encoding and decoding into Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android. (Did Macromedia or Adobe ever consider buying On2?) Is there a play for adding FMS to Wave to deliver audio and video and better immediacy via RTMFP? I don’t know. But the competitive landscape is shifting around Adobe with the introduction of things like smart phones, Silverlight, and Chrome. Adobe isn’t going to be able to compete with everyone, in every way, all the time.

    One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about your blogs is how open and enthusiastic you have been about other people’s products – regardless of platform. So I was a little surprised to see Wave described as a demo and the coverage of Wave as a hypefest. Yes, Google is getting a lot of press but in comparison to what Apple and Microsoft say about their products, Google’s statements look almost modest. I hope Adobe isn’t going to miss opportunities to work with Google. Capitalism isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation. I think Adobe should look seriously at adopting Wave and, if possible, should be talking to Google about the future of video on the Web, as well as about a better and more secure player/browser interface.

    Yours truly,
    -Brian

  • Andy

    You know what I’m excited about for Wave? That it won’t run 10x slower on a Mac than it does on a PC… Couldn’t say the same thing if it was built in Flash.

  • http://zarate.tv Zarate

    Well, I mostly agree with the post.

    However, this could have not been done in Flash, not even now. See, there are some people that **still** cannot properly use the keyboard in Flash applications:

    http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-40

    This is SO basic and yet SO low in Adobe’s TODO list that actually hurts.

    When you talk about applications used mostly for communicating (Wave, Reader, GMail) you can hardly take Flash seriously because a great bunch of people cannot use the simplest of input methods: the keyboard.

    :(

  • http://lazycoder.com Scott Koon

    @MK – Re: Advanced DataGrid vs. JS.

    Never underestimate the albatross that is requiring a plugin. Sun couldn’t pull it off with Java, Microsoft couldn’t pull it off with ActiveX. Adobe has come the closest thanks to YouTube.

  • X

    Ryan without your hyperbolic bile – the more thoughtful responses may not have surfaced.

    thank you?

  • Dan C

    @iPhone App Developer:
    Sounds like being an iPhone IS like being in a rock band, but your percentages are wrong. Maybe 1/10th of 1 percent make it big, and probably 95% never make any money off the deal.

  • http://www.simplfiedchaos.com Todd

    I think the big thing with Wave isn’t the UI, but the crazy backend. I’d like to see you guys do that with the LiveCycle Data Services platform. I’d not hold my breath, though…

    Actually, after remembering how poor the Tour of California application behaved, I’d rather not…

  • leef

    Spread to thin?

    Adobe is spread too THIN to stick to any one thing, and make it 100% great. Look at your long list of applications, you have at three image editors. Now for each of those applications you have to maintain Mac/PC versions. That’s A LOT of bullshit to deal with, which ultimately distracts from focusing on something truly grand. It’s always bugged me that each Adobe app has completely different key-shortcuts for identical functions. Why isn’t the scale-transformation key-command the same in Photoshop as it is in Illustrator, as it is in After Effects, as it is in Flash? Probably because Adobe is spread way to thin to be consistent. Strip out the long list of applications, and make them remarkably reliable, easy-to-use, and open/extendable.

    Sorry Adobe, fortunately you’re the default choice for many things, but your execution almost always feels approx 75%…

  • Robert

    @Rob – flash was never meant to be a replacement for the browser. Why should it display html? Because your manager wants to use technology incorrectly?

  • http://www.barefootmobile.com/blogs/blinky/ Emanuele Cipolloni

    @Robert – flash was not envisioned as application development/runtime either, in fact started as an animation plug-in for the web. It has been expanded significantly in its scope, but now more and more the ties of the past are creating a strangling bottleneck. Lack of multithreading, heavy usage of cpu, inconsistent workload on different architectures (Mac/Windows) are real problems for anybody that wants to create a large distributed systems like Google Wave.

    The fact that at every iteration of the platform we have to wait for at least 2-3 updates before we can fully thrust the IDE enough to use it in production environment also says a lot.

  • http://matthewfabb.com Matthew Fabb

    It’s funny when people point out that Google Wave doesn’t need a plugin, when apparently a lot of it’s extra features of Wave are dependent on a plugin, Google Gears. Good marketing on Google’s front in pushing the HTML5 angle while Gears isn’t mentioned much.

    In the comments people talk about Google Wave being available on any browser and any operating system, yet it only supports Chrome, Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5. IE users will be required to change browsers or install the Chrome frame plugin. Something that hasn’t gotten that much attention and is likely going to hurt mainstream adoption of Wave.

    I think a lot of the hype has to with brand recognition. Personally, I think Adobe’s Buzzword is vastly superior over Google Docs, but it’s Docs that gets a lot more attention because of the Google brand name. Similar, I don’t think Adobe’s Photoshop.com doesn’t compare to the amazing Photoshop-like Flash based applications out there like Aviary.com’s Phoenix. However, a lot of people know the Photoshop brand name and when the Photoshop.com beta was released, there was a lot of hype about it.

    I don’t think Wave could have gotten as nearly as much attention and hype without the Google brand name. Adobe or Microsoft could have released it the same way and I don’t think it would have gotten the same attention.

  • Bjorn Schultheiss

    @Fabb

    Thats probably because most of the excited users are already gmail users and they see Wave as a possible replacement.

    If Microsoft were releasing a replacement for Office, existing Office users would be equally as interested.

  • http://broadcast.oreilly.com/brian-lesser/ Brian Lesser

    Other than dragging files from the desktop into Wave, what other features require Gears?

  • Alessandro

    Ryan,
    why are you so worried about Wave ?
    You have :
    The wave provider:
    It is an extension of a XMPP server. It could be seen as new generation of a SMTP server with near real time messages and more.
    To be really successfull the world should be full of Wave providers (XMPP++) other than HTTP and SMTP servers otherwise it is a google private thing.
    How many years will it take ?
    How much it cost to an ISP(or a company) to implement a scalable and realtime Wave provider infrastructure ?
    Did you worry about SMTP servers ?
    Did you worry about HTTP servers ?
    Adobe could build (or add) the capabilities in its server products or just use any provider following the spec

    Wave client
    Here Adobe could build some AS3 extensions (in FP or in FLEX) that natively talk to a wave provider (not a huge task it seems) in order to merge the beauty of Flash UI with the new protocol capabilities.

    So at the end the time will tell if the good Google idea (or vision) will be something useful and economically sustainable from someone not being Google.

  • http://blog.toppingdesign.com Topper

    I think you’re wrong when you say “people don’t get excited by standards.” The problem with the Adobe products is that they cost money (sometimes several thousand dollars) to accomplish the same thing as what wave is doing. So what that sets up in people’s mind is something akin to: “oh – I could do this, but no one else is going to – so why should I bother?”

    When things are built on open standards, the friction of a pay wall goes away, giving developers the freedom to play with things on their own time. It also *feels* a lot more likely for an idea to spread.

    So while, yes, a lot of this might have been possible a while ago, flash and flex suffer from a lack of great developers and then their pay wall. It has traditionally been very difficult (forget the expense) to get up and running and playing with the technologies that make wave the amazing demo it is.

  • Nicolas

    Adobe is clearly at a turnpoint with its FMS product and RTMP protocol :

    - On the video front, RTMP has been disqualified as a valid protocol to deliver scalable, splitable live streams. RTMP for VOD is no more usable, as it is difficult to cache at a low cost. This has hold Adobe outside from the corporate world so far. Silverlight HTTP based delivery has won the delivery war and further more, Akamaï now puts its energy in Flash HTTP delivery (without FMS) – which paradoxically puts Flash video back in the corporate video delivery game, as it is now cachable/splitable. Security is no more an argument, as RTMPE has been clearly shown as crackable. So now, we don’t take muck risk by saying that neither FMS nor RTMP are necessary to deliver Flash video, without sacrifying service quality.

    - On the RTC front, RTMP has lost its advance as XMPP grew and set its place as the dominant open-source, extendable protocol. Shared data model in FMS has been starving as Adobe tried to develop the video part of the product. Even the late open-sourcing of RTMP has not changed it, as the protocol was reversed for a long time and that alternative servers do the thing for nothing. RTMP and FMS are still the quickest choice for simple chat projects, but there are alternatives coming. Adobe new intiatives in RTC are to fail, as people who thought FMS was already overpriced won’t spend a penny in hosted services, and developers won’t dive in it as they cannot control the technology. That’s a matter of time to see that neither FMS nor RTMP are necessary to deliver realtime interactions, especially with a strong and extendable protocol like XMPP.

    So what’s next ?

    - On the video front, I think the best FMS can do is to become an intelligent Apache video plugin for all CDNs who won’t have dev resources to recode FMS. FMS as an origin server won’t work, as Wowza does it already far better.

    - On the RTC front, that’s where Adobe’s FMS can do something again. Rebuilt from the ground-up with native AS3, real SDK and XMPP support, FMS can indeed gain back a part of its native success, if Adobe gives away its hosted plans and bundles the AFCS SIP/screensharing features in FMS, together with the open-sourcing of RTMFP. If FMS+Flex becomes the mighty toolbox for developers hungry to build on the edge applications, it can gain back some attention. Else it will slowly die (and we’ll all be sad).

    That’s why it will be very interesting to listen to Adobe’s announcements around FMS roadmap @ MAX !

    To conclude, I’d say that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Google buys Adobe : there will be enough developer resources to make the good products evolve, and finally we’ll get a VPx encoding engine inside the Flash Player :-)

  • http://johnwilker.com John Wilker

    So here’s my take as a recovering developer :) and one of the few people without a Wave account.

    I don’t think adobe tools, or MS, coulda built wave 5 years ago, I certainly didn’t see that type of messaging, etc when I was in the space back then, BUT…

    I think Adobe has a problem i’m all to familiar with. 360|Flex will never be JavaOne, or Oracle world, or AJAX experience (in terms of size, cache, etc). Adobe will never (nor will M$) be the trend setting, “OH MY GOD” company, because they make tools, and sell them. That’s a limiting factor on Hype.

    As you said, Flex devs are busy working for good consulting rates, and nice salaries, and companies are busy building kick ass apps, no one has the time, interest or money to spare, to built something like Wave, and then give it away free. If Wave wasn’t free (ie built by anyone BUT the Goog) it wouldn’t have any traction. Free always get’s hype. There’s no barrier to trying it out, except of course, the false sense of scarcity (“OMG who has a Wave invite for me? I can’t live without one!”), so people give it a shot. Some like it, some don’t but everyone talks about it, builds waves, that they’ll use for a week, etc.

    Adobe rocks at making tools that let developers build kick ass things. But it’s not a “thought leader” like Google is. Which i think is fine, but something Adobe has to get used to.

    Look at MAX Sneaks. Tons of cool things, that tease developers, and never see the light of day. IF Adobe wants to exist on the level google does, every sneak should be in labs, should be a “beta” and should require an invite. Some won’t stick, some will. But each one that’s released will create a storm of interest, that will either die out (pull the project) or escalate (put more resources into it).

    Adobe (IMO) is far too guarded and secretive. Google made wave, threw it out into the wild and that was it. If it flopped, they’d move on. In my experience Adobe isn’t willing to try that kind of thing, and short of that changing I just don’t see them existing on the same space.

    OK. That was my .02 :) I love you guys you know that ;)

    Awesome post Ryan!

  • http://www.colabry.com Arnie Widdowson

    Between LCCS and Stratus (with multi-cast) Adobe is better positioned technically than Google for next generation of collaborative apps. Trouble is the We need more people to see the “Adobe dance”.

  • http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/ Joseph Labrecque

    Google just killed off Wave!!!

    Good riddance!

    http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/wave-goodbye-to-google-wave/