Google Drops Wave, Other Products

10 Hot Google Apps for Productivity

In a post about enterprise barriers to collaboration, IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson mentioned her difficulty in warming up to Google Wave, saying she found its best use - at least for her - was collaborating on shopping lists with her husband. " ... That's not exactly worth leaving your email for," she wrote.

Loraine apparently wasn't the only one who had trouble seeing Wave as a useful social platform. As BBC News reports, Google is killing off Wave, along with six other products. The list includes Google Gears, an effort to allow users to retain Web browser functionality while working offline, and Knol, a Wikipedia-like function Google hoped would help improve online content.

Some of the products will be integrated as features into other Google products, wrote Urs Hlzle, Google's vice president of operations, on the company's official blog. Google's goal is to create "a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience," he said in his post.

The BBC News item includes comments from Ovum analyst Richard Edwards, who lauded Google's willingness to experiment but warned it might need to rethink how it introduces new services as "it can be difficult for people to pick out the substance from the hype." Google might want to model itself on Apple, which announces a few new products just once or twice a year, Edwards suggested. Other industry observers have suggested Google needs to sharpen its focus on a smaller set of products.