• Gogleblog et al. , Thursday, August 5, 2010 2:18 PM

Say 'So long' to Google Wave. The search giant said Wednesday that it plans to stop developing the much-hyped collaboration tool as a standalone product, and its site will likely be shut down next year. Yes, despite having "numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Urs H"lzle, SVP of operations at Google, wrote in a company blog post Wednesday.

"Unmentioned in the official product obituary: Google's impatience," remarks Gawker. "Google Wave was released to the world just this past May, barely two months ago. A fundamentally new communication system like Wave is useless without a large base of users, so Google really should have given the product more than 77 days to catch on." Still, "Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked," writes The New York Times' Bits blog. Indeed, "The service was deemed too complicated by many users, with an explanatory video lasting more than an hour," notes the Financial Times. "Earlier this year Google had said it planned to simplify the service, but this failed to boost uptake."

"Our policy is we try things," Google CEO Schmidt said Wednesday upon the news of Wave's demise. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

In the words of The Register: "Schmidt tried to recast Wave's failure as proof that the world's largest ad broker was willing to live dangerously."

Still, Wave's core principals -- chiefly that the browser is replacing the desktop as the focal point of consumers' computing lives -- will live on at Google through various offerings.

"While very few of [people] may be shedding tears over the demise of Google Wave, or even knew what it was, we probably haven't seen the last of this service," writes PCWorld. "The search giant says the technology behind its ill-fated collaboration tool will live on in new products that have not yet been announced."

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