The news today is that Google is ending Wave development and only committing to keeping the Wave site up until the end of the year. Was anyone surprised by this? I was skeptical of Google Wave from the beginning for the simple reason that if someone tells you that their hard to describe product will revolutionize everything, no, it’s not going to do that. It reminded me of the hype that preceded the introduction of the Segway. When you are told that an invention is so amazing that they will be rewriting laws and redesigning cities for it and the product turns out to be a Segway, you can’t help but be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the Segway is an amazing piece of technology, but it’s no wheelchair that can climb stairs or an ultra-efficient Stirling engine.

What would your reaction be if you were told a company was about to release a revolutionary robot personal assistant, something right out of science fiction and new home builders would be smart to scrap their traditional designs in exchange for ones that favor this innovative robot, and it turned out to be a Roomba? You can’t help but be disappointed.

That’s how it was for me with Google Wave. Wait, all the cheering and hype for this? First off, what the heck is it? It’s not email, it’s sort of like a Wiki but it seems a heck of a lot like a chat room. Is it a chat room? Is it one of those over-hyped “collaborative” things? Collaboration is great, but do we really need to be able to edit the same document all at the same time? The inability of Google to answer the simple question “what’s it for?” with a simple, straightforward answer ultimately doomed Wave to be another failed Google experiment.