I always wonder if Google Wave was just ahead of its time. Why can't any email be the start of a collaborative document, and if you and the recipient happen to be online and available at the same time, turn it into a chat?

I think Google Wave proved that UX confusion was a bigger hurdle than the tech for collaborative editing.

I mean, Google Wave was also very slow and unusable in practice as it was invite only in a way that meant even in my pretty tight knit circles of "people who all went to Google I/O almost every year" there was always at less than one person who didn't have access to it... I don't see how it possibly could have succeeded; it is as if they fundamentally didn't understand that the reason that worked for Gmail was because Gmail was just one option in a federated ecosystem, and so everyone already had email, but would never work for a real communication tool building an audience from scratch.

They also repeatedly said that Wave would be federated, but the official Wave instance never was. That and the only code they released (at least until the project was canned, AFAIK) was missing several features that seemed pretty core to the usage of the software.

I was CEO of a software company who sold an Outlook add-in product and did a lot of Outlook/Exchange consulting. I went to I/O every year as well, and toyed with the idea of making a better Exchange<-->Wave connector. Glad I didn't.

Also have a prototype for what at the time was an improved Outlook to Google Calendar sync (e.g. it maintained coloring by converting color categories in Outlook to Google subcalendars of matching colors) but was hesitant to productize it one reason being I wasn't sure if Google Calendar would live long enough to make it worthwhile.

I wonder if a reputation for prematurely killing their products is harming Google's ecosystem-building efforts.

> I wasn't sure if Google Calendar would live long enough to make it worthwhile.

I didn’t use google calendar for repeating yearly appointments for almost a decade because I thought the same thing. Glad to know I wasn’t alone!

But groups are on Slack, etc, which everyone doesn't have.

Slack does not limit the number of people who can sign up for it. If Wave gave everyone using it infinite invites then it could have worked fine, but they did not.

Was Wave part of gapps though? Or did it predate all of that? Maybe it might have had a chance if you could have collaborated within an organization rather than only as individuals.

Edit to answer my own question, looks like the original G Suite was in August 2006, but at the time it was just GMail, Calendar, and Sites. Docs was added in early 2007. Wave was a thing under Google from 2009-2012, but was never part of G Suite.

If Google could integrate Gmail, Google Docs, and Chat to make this happen it would make a huge difference to me. I spent a lot of time collaborating on incoming and outgoing email with a combination of Docs and Slack. This also has the tendency to silo both the end-result and the discussion where that would be something useful to have in some sort of shared repository.

Microsoft teams does this which surprised me. I sent someone an excel file as an attachment and they were able to edit the file inline

Have you looked at missiveapp.com and frontapp.com ?

They both look really interesting but suffer from the same issue: top-down vs. bottom-up adoption. There’s no way I can convince everyone to choose a new system for email just to collaborate with me.

Because email runs on protocols, formats and implementations built decades ago and running everywhere. It's why it's so universal and reliable but also why new advancements can't really happen - unless everyone is on the same service using proprietary features.

I’m certain that advance can happen. Just look at Calendar invites. They certainly weren’t envisioned at the time that email, MIME, SMTP, etc were started. But calendar invitation were cleverly designed to work within email itself. I know many users who don’t even realize that when they create calendar events and invite colleagues at other companies to a meeting, that that is actually just going over email. The clients do a good job of obfuscating that fact.