Good riddance!

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

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!

- 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.