Thanks for the history lesson grasshopper. I have used wave - I was on the google Wave team here in Sydney. I was working on it the day the project was cancelled. (An intern then a contractor though, not a FTE, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect.)
I'm quite aware it was opensourced - I was part of the 6 person skeleton crew that opensourced it. Look me up in the codebase if you like - grep for comments in the Apache Wave codebase by @gentle. I think I still have commit access.
To catch you up, the opensource effort floundered. Unsurprisingly the 350k lines of dense, complicated, glitchy GWT java code we threw over the wall hasn't found the community of experienced developers it needs to fix bugs and add features. Its barely had a commit land in the last 3 years.
Like reader for you, Wave's cancellation was somewhat personal for me. Here's a secondary tragedy you might not know if you've only read Wave's wikipedia page: About 6 months before Wave was cancelled, Google bought AppJet (makers of Etherpad). Their team came to Sydney to work on Wave. After Wave was cancelled, for guessable reasons the AppJet team would stay at google for the next few years. They got stuck working on non-etherpad, non-wave projects. Their team eventually split apart and would never be reunited. The tragedy of google Wave resulted in not 1 but 2 innovative collaborative editors dying.
Do I trust Google to maintain projects I care about? No, duh. Picasa. Google Buzz. Protobuf spent years being unmaintained. Sparrow (the email client). Google Code Search. Orkut. GTalk's commitment to open messaging protocols. Glass.
If firebase doesn't get enough traction, do you think they'll keep it around, SLAs or no? I wouldn't bet money on it. I certainly wouldn't bet my business or professional reputation on it.
All of Google's enterprise offerings have support. I know, because I actually work in such a support team.
Great. So why did google stop returning calls and emails from HomeAutomation? This thread exists because one of firebase's cofounders dropped the ball on an email. Why did a busy cofounder result in a complete communications blackout to a paying customer?
There's an old piece of wisdom that the only way to get google to fix something is to either know a google engineer or complain loudly enough on social media. Yesterday that saying seemed to still be true.
I'm sure you work really hard to fight this problem at Google. Thankyou for that. I can't imagine its an easy job. But Google has a long way to go before I'm willing to lock my product in to one of their newish services.
Comments
Thanks for the history lesson grasshopper. I have used wave - I was on the google Wave team here in Sydney. I was working on it the day the project was cancelled. (An intern then a contractor though, not a FTE, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect.)
I'm quite aware it was opensourced - I was part of the 6 person skeleton crew that opensourced it. Look me up in the codebase if you like - grep for comments in the Apache Wave codebase by @gentle. I think I still have commit access.
To catch you up, the opensource effort floundered. Unsurprisingly the 350k lines of dense, complicated, glitchy GWT java code we threw over the wall hasn't found the community of experienced developers it needs to fix bugs and add features. Its barely had a commit land in the last 3 years.
Like reader for you, Wave's cancellation was somewhat personal for me. Here's a secondary tragedy you might not know if you've only read Wave's wikipedia page: About 6 months before Wave was cancelled, Google bought AppJet (makers of Etherpad). Their team came to Sydney to work on Wave. After Wave was cancelled, for guessable reasons the AppJet team would stay at google for the next few years. They got stuck working on non-etherpad, non-wave projects. Their team eventually split apart and would never be reunited. The tragedy of google Wave resulted in not 1 but 2 innovative collaborative editors dying.
Do I trust Google to maintain projects I care about? No, duh. Picasa. Google Buzz. Protobuf spent years being unmaintained. Sparrow (the email client). Google Code Search. Orkut. GTalk's commitment to open messaging protocols. Glass.
If firebase doesn't get enough traction, do you think they'll keep it around, SLAs or no? I wouldn't bet money on it. I certainly wouldn't bet my business or professional reputation on it.
Great. So why did google stop returning calls and emails from HomeAutomation? This thread exists because one of firebase's cofounders dropped the ball on an email. Why did a busy cofounder result in a complete communications blackout to a paying customer?
https://medium.com/@contact_16315/firebase-costs-increased-b...
There's an old piece of wisdom that the only way to get google to fix something is to either know a google engineer or complain loudly enough on social media. Yesterday that saying seemed to still be true.
I'm sure you work really hard to fight this problem at Google. Thankyou for that. I can't imagine its an easy job. But Google has a long way to go before I'm willing to lock my product in to one of their newish services.