It’s a whole host of Mediterranean food analogies with those guys over at Google. First they are throwing spaghetti against the wall and then they are doing the Aegean equivalent of shooting the bird at us for not wanting to eat the spaghetti that has been thrown against the wall. What the hell am I talking about? Google Wave, you idiots. Of course it’s Google Wave.
See here is the thing. We don’t know what to do with Google Wave. There was that whole invitations thing. Plus it was never really pushed in a public way. It takes years to figure out what to do with a new technology once we have acquired it. Domestication of plants started with the fig like 10 or 12,000 years ago. What did we get first? The fig. It took another 6,000 years or so to get the pecan. Would you rather have a fig newton or pecan pie? (If you chose fig newton then please stop reading now and go watch some LOLcat videos.)
The point is that if Google is going to invent these things, they need to expect that some will take time to be adopted. Gmail works on a principle with which we were previously familiar (ie: email). Google docs, same same. Google Google worked for so long as a basic search thingy because we didn’t have to figure out how to use it. Now that we know how to use it, Google has made it more powerful and flexible. (Ok, they did that because of Bing, but we can handle it because we are used to the technology.)
Google Wave had — and still has — a lot of potential to become the operating platform of the web. It wasn’t all that long ago that we were executing commands using lines of text. Graphical user interfaces are only the second generation of operating systems. An interactive operating system is another level of conceptual thought that users need some time to wrap their heads around. By pulling the plug now, for reasons of “slow adopting,” it seems like Google is calling us slow in the head. They’re giving us the fig.
pecan pie. get out of my head.