Remember Google Wave, the technology that was supposed to change everything? Google announced it was shutting it down.
The official Google Blog post offers the basic story:
…Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product…
It might seem weird that the megaton company of the 21st century would be admitting defeat, but Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo offers an explanation:
“Remember, we celebrate our failures,” CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters earlier this month. “This is a company where it’s absolutely OK to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that and apply it to something different.”
It appears that Google Wave has in fact, gone up and then back down again. It hit a crest and then found a troff. The service is at an end.
But if one of the most successful and innovative technology companies in the world can fail with such style, shouldn’t the rest of us? After all: Failure is the secret to success.