Daily Archives: March 17, 2010

Is Google Wave getting Buzzed?

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That’s the question being asked by by Tom Krazit.

If Google Wave eventually fails to live up to the promise and hype that accompanied its launch at Google I/O in May 2009, consider its demise an inside job.

Arguably one of Google’s biggest announcements of last year, Google Wave appears to be an afterthought among the tech trendsetters after the launch of Google Buzz in early February. Privacy concerns mostly laid to rest, Google Buzz is actually doing much of what Google Wave promised: collaborative discussion, media sharing, and social networking within an e-mail-like framework.

So what are Google customers and users to do with two Web communication platforms? Is Google Buzz simply a stepping stone to Google Wave, as TechCrunch suggested at its launch? Or is it something more, something designed to bypass its more powerful yet complicated corporate sibling?

Don’t expect a direct answer from Google. In all fairness, that’s because it simply doesn’t know: with Wave and Buzz, Google is essentially willing to let the best idea win.

“At the end of the day, we’ll find out what users want,” said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for the Wave project. “If we required every product we launched not to have any overlapping functionality, that would dramatically slow down our innovation.”

So: we’ll find out in due course. Personally I’m not convinced that users have a need for either Wave or Buzz.

Google discovers that phones are hard-ware

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

This morning, analytics outfit Flurry, which gets a good handle on handset use through app stats, delivered its estimate of Nexus One sales in the phone’s first 74 days, and the news was not good. The 74-day milestone was used because that’s how long it took the first model of Apple’s iPhone to sell one million units. Flurry’s calculation of Nexus One sales over a similar stretch — 135,000 units. The sorry showing has nothing to do with overall enthusiasm for Google’s Android mobile OS; in its first 74 days, Motorola’s Droid sales hit 1.05 million units, a tad better than the original iPhone. Because of assorted market variables, the numbers aren’t directly comparable, but they do provide a general sense of things. And what the numbers would seem to be telling Google is that without the marketing muscle and consumer convenience that come with selling a phone through a major carrier, even a technically impressive piece of hardware is going to have a rough go of it. Google will have to hope things turn around once the Nexus One becomes available on the Verizon network this spring.

And, to add insult to injury, Google’s discovered that its application to trademark ‘Nexus’ has been rejected. Someone else got there first. Google will appeal. Lots of lucrative work for m’learned friends ahead.