I wrote about the demise of Google Wave earlier this week. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch wrote yesterday that Google didn’t give it enough time, and mishandled the launch.

Google definitely mishandled the launch. They made a big announcement but then trickled the product out slowly, wasting most of the initial enthusiasm. In our work we try to go the other way – to get a few key influencers in an organization excited about what we’re doing and let them evangelize their colleagues. That way when the big announcement happens there are already people using the system and ready to support the new arrivals.

I disagree with Siegler’s statement that Wave didn’t solve a problem, though. He wrote that it doesn’t matter, since Twitter doesn’t solve one either. I think it does matter – because Wave did solve a problem. It just wasn’t as big a problem as “the way we communicate doesn’t work.” Google Wave was an excellent email replacement for a certain subset of emails – messages where a small number of people collaborate back and forth on understanding a problem and forming a strategy. This is a critical problem for small and medium sized organizations. And I suspect that if Google was to go back and look at their internal use of Wave they’d see the use case. I wrote about this in my first post, so I won’t re-hash the mechanics here.

So my lesson from this – beyond not trusting Google beta products to be available for my use over the long term – is that when you launch something big you have to launch it small. When I talk about product development at conferences I like to use the example of Flickr. Flickr, today, is big – it’s changed the way that we deal with images. But the original problem was small – sharing pictures online, easily, with friends. Searching billions of images for creative commons licensed pictures to spice up a PowerPoint presentation came later. Hindsight is 20-20, but Google should have found more small, real, value-from-day-one problems that Wave could solve without requiring everyone in the world to adopt it at once. Once I figured out it was useful, I was able to drag my team along by fiat, and we all started evangelizing it to others via our separate projects. Everybody almost won.