Colayer and the Rise & Fall of Google Wave

By Markus Hegi - 8. Aug 2010
Published a shorter version on PuneTech.com - See the comments & discussions!

We started with Colayer one decade ago, in 99, on a journey, which had the same basic concepts as wave: to redefine web communication - and as we were at the peak of the Internet bubble when we started, we choose the provocative slogan "eMail will be dead soon"!

I suffered myself the mess of email communication as a traveling business consultant: I was convinced, that this can not be the way we will communicate in future! This is fundamentally wrong! - I mean: the basic idea of SENDING information on the web is wrong! - The web is a virtual space, where WE travel, not the information (see slides 8 and following - You GO TO and ARE ON facebook, twitter, yahoo - you don't 'download' it ...). And information is organized along CONTEXT - And I was convinced, that this paradigm shift in online communication was about to happen.

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Born in the .com bubble, we were way too optimistic about the time frame - and soon had to realize, that it would take longer for this paradigm shift to take place. Over the years, we always found people seeing our visions and excited working with our technology. We grew to 60 employee, but never got a broader adaption.

When Wave was announced in may 2009, a friend called me up with shaking voice: "Markus, Google has implemented Colayer!!" - the next 3 days I got more than 20 similar calls and messages from alumnis and partners.
When I looked at Wave, it struck me too, how similar the concepts were, and even the implementation had many close similarities. We were excited to see a product from a big player going in the same direction - excited to see, what approach google took to implement the new paradigm - But I also realized quickly, that this product in this stage would not be usable for 3 main reasons:
1) The Technical Architecture was too heavy and complex -
2) The Operability
3) The Notification
We struggled with pretty much the same issues in the beginning and came up with our own solutions: We had a very similar architecture in 2003, but dropped that approach as we saw, it wouldn't work for complexity reasons. The operability, we solved through our shuttle, a floating conversation toolbox. And the notification through our times (I may write more in a separate post later ...)

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But Wave was at its very start, and we all at Colayer were very eager to see, which solutions Google would come up with! - And we believed that with their market power, Google would be able to initiate the paradigm shift in online communication and create a market - and of course hoped, Colayer would get more attention too in this process -
We were looking for a healthy competition with Wave in the following weeks & months. We observed Wave and the user feedback carefully to get feedback for our product too & our future development. And of course to get clues about how Wave would address the above 3 key problems.

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Reto Hartinger from Internet Briefing wrote about Colayer and Google Wave, and did an interview with me. We decided however, not to write too much about the 3 above points yet. We intended to stay in 'stealth mode' for some time, until the direction of Wave was more clear.

But after the Wave launch, it seemed that innovation stopped. Yes, there was development, improvements & many extensions. But the above 3 problems were not addressed. They couldn't be solved through improvements or extensions, but needed fundamental shifts in the product design - which never happened. And as many users seemed to loose patience too, Google pulled the plug for poor user adoption.

What went wrong? - Gartner has a valid point: "Startup innovation" has simply no place in a large enterprise software company. Well, this is not exactly what Gartner writes, but this is essentially the meaning: Either you are in the business of breaking & paradigm shifting innovation (Startups), or you are serving a large base of enterprise customers - Both together is almost impossible, because there is no breaking innovation, without messing up with your customers. After Wave launched, the team could not just say to its 100'000 users: "you know, we just realized that the architecture has a fundamental problem - lets start it again ...!" - which we, in a small company did several times ...

Maybe the biggest mistake we did with building Colayer was, that we choose the wrong market. Partly, that may also be true for Google Wave. We thought, large enterprises would be the best place for the paradigm shift to start:
1) Email communication is especially painful, if used for many-to-many, and
2) adopting the new communication paradigm would generate most value in a large, professional organizations
Hence, we built Colayer as a business application for large enterprises - and never even had a public version!

But the paradigm shift happens elsewhere first: If you observe today's kids and young nerds, you can imagine, how the next generation of businesses will use online communication: Email for them is 'lame' and just used for communication with outsiders, older people and the 'conservative' business world. Why would you need email anyway in a world of Facebook & Foursquare?
After 10 years, we are still in the beginning of the massive paradigm shift of online communication. I am eager to see, who will try it next, and who will finally succeed!

If you would like to know more about Colayer:
> Two videos give a good basic introduction of how Colayer works in projects.
> On colayer.com, you find an overview of articles about Colayer vs Google Wave.
> Use our Virtual Reception on colayer.com - simply type into the box to interact with us.
The current Colayer version 2.9 is from end of 2008, 6 months before Wave was announced. Colayer started that time the development of a new platform 3.0, which is scheduled to launch in 3 months.