Wave launched internally at Google to much fanfare at TGIF, and the whole company was somewhat amazed at the time by its realtime collaborative editing. Wave was built as a secret project in Australia, so when it did launch, internally there was understandably some rife / confusion as to what the strategy was.
The tech for appjet was primarily Javascript server-side, and I believe it used GWT for Java->Javascript client-side. This was seen as very odd to many inside Google, as javascript on the server was a new concept back then, and a far cry from the "officially supported" languages for development at Google.
While the initial launch of Wave went ~okay, the product itself had massive scalability issues. The Appjet/Etherpad team was then aqui-hired and quickly relocated to Australia. While one would think they were acquired for the similarities between Wave and Etherpad, they were instead tasked with "fixing" the javascript server-side performance situation. This made sense to management as appjet had been pioneering the concept since before Node was a thing.
In the end this wasn't a great outcome for the acquired team, but is typical of the aqui-hiring Google does.
Doc and sheets later added comments and realtime collaborative editing, but it was all reimplemented and never directly lifted from Wave's implementation.
The tech for appjet was primarily Javascript server-side, and I believe it used GWT for Java->Javascript client-side. This was seen as very odd to many inside Google, as javascript on the server was a new concept back then, and a far cry from the "officially supported" languages for development at Google.
While the initial launch of Wave went ~okay, the product itself had massive scalability issues. The Appjet/Etherpad team was then aqui-hired and quickly relocated to Australia. While one would think they were acquired for the similarities between Wave and Etherpad, they were instead tasked with "fixing" the javascript server-side performance situation. This made sense to management as appjet had been pioneering the concept since before Node was a thing.
In the end this wasn't a great outcome for the acquired team, but is typical of the aqui-hiring Google does.
Doc and sheets later added comments and realtime collaborative editing, but it was all reimplemented and never directly lifted from Wave's implementation.