Originally Posted by Ferris Bueller

Also, I find it to be just as intuitive as any other piece of new software once you get used to it. Like photoshop...the first time you start it up you think to yourself "holy crap, i'm never going to be able to figure this crap out" and a month later you're thinking "how the hell did i NOT get how to use this before?"...then 6 years later you're drooling about CS5 and its super sexy recomposition algorithms...

"Intuitive" isn't a good thing in complex systems. "Intuitive" means "easy for the beginner to figure out" and most apps, once you've used them for a few months, and have gotten to be at the very least an intermediate-level user, fail to make the transition from "intuitive" to "powerful." Here is a post by Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience Team, on the command frequency use in Word. To me, the entire thing point under discussion says "the needs of the power user are so very, very far below those of the novice that we at MS need a telescope to see them." And, when your user base is a few hundred million, who's to say you're wrong?

Wave is in a somewhat similar situation. It's very much a mass-market product. Yes, all those little apps like LaTeX interpreter plugins or equation writers are neat and great to have, but they appeal to a comparatively tiny segment of the potential Wave-user market. To be adopted, Wave has to start out easy to learn and use for the novice. But given the numbers Google has to play around with (I'm guesstimating 10-30 million or so -- this isn't quite as mass-market as GMail, which now has 150 million) it can do a test run of 100,000 and not really affect the public release.

But then, Google isn't dealing with a fixed release schedule. Hell, they don't even have to roll out the same Wave for everyone. A/B testing is a time-honoured technique that I'm sure they've used in the past. *coughgmailcough* I predict that your Wave experience will change significantly over time, mostly due to new and useful-to-you (for as yet unknown values of "you") features being introduced, as well as custom mods and apps waxing in popularity.

All that said, I'm seriously underwhelmed by the current state of the Wave experience. For me, the two fatal flaws are:

Lack of any sort of integration with other Google products or, failing that, any type of notification that you've received an update to a wave. (this firefox add-on aside)

Brutal lag whenever a wave gets beyond a certain number of blips or participants.

Here's to fixing these, and a host of other issues. I'd really *like* to have something like Wave be a success. This is the most noise I've heard about a Google product in a while -- since GMail, really -- I don't think this is a product line Google can just abandon now.