Google Wave's unproductive email metaphors
OK, I took a few hours off from playing with Google Wave yesterday. I read all my comments on the post I wrote Thursday about Google Wave, many of which were very ascerbic toward me. — I took the day off and said “what if they are right?” …
Context & Ripple Effects
Five months after Google billed Wave as a new communication platform for a new web, the product is in limited preview and being picked apart by its first wave of invited users. A July reality check already pushed back on the ambition, and Lifehacker's late-September first look gave a broader audience its first hands-on sense of how disorienting the interface can be.
Scobleizer's piece is a notable reversal inside that arc: an early champion publicly entertaining the argument that his own commenters have been making — that Wave's design leans on unproductive email metaphors rather than explaining its own model.
First-order effects
- Early invited users face a steeper learning curve than the demo videos suggested, because the interface borrows inbox-and-thread habits that don't map onto how Wave actually works.
- The critique lands directly on Google's preview strategy: with access gated by invitations, negative word-of-mouth from influential early adopters like Scoble shapes who asks for — and who bothers using — an invite.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in web collaboration (the space Wave was explicitly pitched against) get a ready-made pitch: familiar metaphors and lower retraining cost become a selling point against Google's blank-slate approach.
- Pressure builds on Google to invest in onboarding — tutorials, guided walkthroughs, redesigned terminology — before wider release, since the product's fate at this stage depends on converting curious testers into daily users.
Third-order effects
- If Wave's adoption stalls on comprehension rather than capability, it becomes a case study that real-time collaborative tools succeed or fail on mental-model clarity, not feature count — a lesson every subsequent unified-inbox-meets-docs product inherits.
- The episode feeds a broader debate about whether next-generation communication platforms should break from email entirely or evolve it gradually, a fork that will shape how the industry designs shared workspaces.
The trend: Communication platforms that fuse email, chat, and documents are discovering that radical interface reinvention collides with the habits their users bring from older tools.