Google has just announced the death of ‘Google Wave’, its highest profile project within Google Labs. So, Email is NOT dead – not yet anyway

 Wave is a real time messaging platform that promised to revolutionize real time collaboration within distributed teams and I – along with many others – was excited by its potential, as my June blog Wave goodbye to email pointed out.

In pulling the plug, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, reminded journos that part of the Google ethos is to celebrate failure as well as success:

We try things,” he said. “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,” he continued.

A lesson there for all of us I think. 

The Wave service will remain live for the time being but will not be developed further. Google will be taking the elements that worked and build them into other projects and it is also releasing other elements to third party developers.   

To paraphrase Dr Spock: ‘Its failure Captain but not as we know it.’ I also love the relaxed, informal way the CEO Eric Schmidt speaks with the journos on the announcement as you can see in this YouTube video: Google CEO Eric Schmidt on death of Google Wave

I wonder what will eventually kill off email as a collaboration, information flow, sharing and management tool? Thoughts?