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Wave? Good-bye!

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40hz:
It's a variant on the old "Pure vs Applied Sciences" argument. I *totally* bet that Google invented some new "technologies" to make Wave.
-TaoPhoenix (July 02, 2013, 12:08 PM)
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^Amen!  :Thmbsup:

Especially if the 'collateral' developments paid for the effort of launching what was arguably an insane project.

Like the space program, going to the moon was largely PR and pure science. The real day to day benefit was realized in developing all the technologies that made the voyage possible. The investment of going to the moon paid us back a thousandfold.

Yup. Google (and the 'old school' NASA) are crazy alright. Crazy like a fox. ;D

wraith808:
Well, the thing that people don't understand in a lot of cases with Google is that everything is Beta... it's a research project, and they scrap the bad, and repackage the good.  A lot of what Wave was has been repackaged in other products.  Hangouts are a *lot* like what wave was.

IainB:
@IainB - I'll +1 with you on Wave. I could never see what the big deal (or even the gist of it) was with that orphan.
I've since ensconced Wave in the same gallery in my memory palace I've put Chandler, the APL programming language,  all of deconstructionist literary theory, transformational grammar, the 'new' math, and the concepts of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida in.
 ;D
-40hz (July 02, 2013, 10:33 AM)
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Hahaha, very droll, if a little unkind.
As for APL, yes, but I recall reading somewhere that APL had been used by Readers' Digest at one time to just about run their entire marketing operation - no?

superboyac:
Ha...IainB.  I remember that, i still have all those business process documents you sent me.  In fact, I actually did complete that project, but "they" felt all that hardcore stuff was too much.  They have just last month started training the employees on that stuff.

IainB:
Getting serious for a min,
We're uncovering an unstated principle of "innovative". Apparently it's NOT enough to be "innovative". But that the innovation must also be "useful".
It's a variant on the old "Pure vs Applied Sciences" argument. I *totally* bet that Google invented some new "technologies" to make Wave.
But we *didn't like it*, so "who cares what they invented, it died in the marketplace".
In some ways, that's a problem.
-TaoPhoenix (July 02, 2013, 12:08 PM)
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I quite agree that one should not condemn innovation or (especially) pure research on the basis of it being "not useful", or something. Though ever-skeptical I would never suggest that, and I did not condemn Wave - I explored it, like I would any new thing.  I explored Google Reader and found it to be useful, but Wave was not, that's all.

A research example: My late father-in-law had been an industrial chemist with ICI in Northwich, UK. During WWII he was not allowed to enlist as the work he was doing was considered too important to the war effort - they were making polythene.
He told me how the stuff had originally been discovered by accident in their labs - produced as a gooey blob, a by-product of a production process gone wrong, and they thought it was a waste product.
However, after playing about with it and doing some further research, they found they could produce it consistently, and that it had several important potential applications (uses) - as Bakelite did, for example.
A bit of history here: History of the World: the first piece of polythene

But there are big differences between "pure research", innovation, and a product marketing ß test of a hyped-up piece of prototyped software - for example, such as Google Wave (which was based on an existing software design called EtherPad). There was arguably little if anything new that seemed to come out of Wave, and, if you look, you will see that the good bits (the existing EtherPad) seemed to have been incorporated beautifully into Google Docs collaborative editing, with apparently little if any major variation from the original EtherPad. So, one could say that nothing much of any good was wasted, and as @wraith808 suggests, some of the other bits may have been recycled and found their way into (Google+) Hangouts, or similar.

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