A Temporary Wave of Innovation
Great post by Lars Rasmussen of Google on the initial failure of Wave beta and lessons learned. But there is one overwhelming lesson for innovators in the Wave introduction that is often missed in all of the hype. It’s a lesson about how arrogance still gets in the way of innovation.
Lars,
First off congrats on the upfront tone of your post. The first step in recovery is taking responsibility. That said there is at least one overwhelming lesson to be learned from the initial Wave introduction that needs to be understood.
IMHO - the lesson is simply that Google, as well as anyone else trying to innovate in a big way, must collaborate with the market in an open and democratic manner. The widely advertised invitation approach to test Wave was just flat out wrong.
When you do a market test on part of the market, which YOU define based on your criteria (or even the extended criteria of those YOU identify), you create an exclusivity that flies in the face of the openness of the web. It is supremely ironic that Google, of all companies, would do this with Wave, of all products (a broad-based collaborative tool!?).
When you exclude the majority of your market from participating, and make a huge stink about the fact that only a select few can be part of the innovation, you effectively close the door on, and piss off, the vast majority of your marketplace.
The result was predictable - the market snubbed their collective nose at Wave while the choir sang to the choir.
Today innovation needs to be a full-on collaboration with the market. Focus groups, sampling, limited beta testing are things we used to do when we didn’t have the option to tap the tremendous potential of the entire market - and even then I’m very suspect of the value they added.
There was a time when the market didn’t want to be part of the innovation process. Guess what…now they do!
Lesson learned?
Tags: google, innovation, market, wave
May 20th, 2010 at 9:51 am
One line summary - “Welcome to the end of consumer ignorance!”