Wave EtherPad good-bye

[vrikodhara]

EtherPad, which was a rather nice web application, which allowed multiple users to work on the same tool simultaneously, has been swallowed whole by Google. Google has already come up with Google wave, which allows you to do that and more. I think most users, at least for collaborative editing, would have found EteherPad more intuitive than Google wave, which uses a more involved interface borrowing elements from e-mail and IM. Moreover, EtherPad has paying customers, who I am sure will not like to move to Google Wave till it becomes more stable.

Typically, when you buy a company selling products that are similar to existing products in your portfolio, you have the following options:

• Kill the competition (This typically wouldn't work for Google as a way to kill competition, because of two reasons
• • Technology is cheap, and someone else might replicate the product
  • Department of Justice and European competition enforcers are still bugging Microsoft, and Google wouldn't like to invite the same kind of trouble)
• Use IP from your product and merge it into the acquired product
• Use IP from the acquired company and merge it into your product
• Use it to complete your product spread (This is probably Google's favorite reason for an acquisition. This is partly what happened when youtube was acquired. It was allowed to operate independent of Google Videos, which eventually morphed into a video search site. This is what happened when Google Spreadsheet along with the acquired Writely formed Google Docs. This is what happened when doubleclick was bought to complement Adsense.)
• Replace/ Kill the existing product (This is what happened to Google Page creator after Google brought JotSpot, which got morphed into Google Sites)

I can't immediately think of any examples for cases where the acquired and the in-house products were merged. The possible example could be in the case of the hundreds of smaller search companies that Google has acquired. But, that might, alternatively be an example of the case where Google has tried to kill the competition.

I just wonder what plans Google has for EtherPad, especially given that 'The (former) EtherPad team mailed in to ask me to try Google Wave.
Dear EtherPad User,

AppJet Inc., the company behind EtherPad, has been acquired by Google [1]. The EtherPad development team will continue its work on real-time collaboration by joining the Google Wave team.

As an EtherPad user, we thought you might be interested in trying out the preview of Google Wave. Like EtherPad, Google Wave lets you collaborate on rich text in really real-time. It also does a bunch of useful things that EtherPad does not do, such as organizing your waves in an inbox. Although Google Wave is only in a preview phase, we think you might still find it useful.

Click the following link to get started with Google Wave:

[URL]

Hope to see you on Google Wave soon,

- The (former) EtherPad Team

[1] http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/google-acquires-appjet

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Edit: EtherPad is now Open Source