Why did Google give up so quickly with Wave? If Wave were an independent company, would they have given up so quickly? How can Google win if they give up so quickly?
As someone who has implemented operational transformation, I believe Google dropped it because it consumes a lot of network resources. If it became popular, Google would have to dedicate a fair chunk of infrastructure to it. Could they do it? Yes. But I believe they ran a little cost/benefit analysis on it at scale and probably decided they didn't want to continue with the wave model.
I am aware that some operational transformation is used in docs, however the usage scenario is different: collaboration is not the default use case and the number of collaborators would be smaller than in a wave, where the default use case is many waves with many participants.
How much infrastructure did it take for Google to run wave? They could put adwords on it like every other product they've done.
They may have used some of their technology in Google Docs. However, they could have refined the Google wave model more. Instead, they hyped it up, and then quickly dumped it.
