Broadly speaking the main issue with GW was ‘poor usability’.
GW was too stressful to use.
Consider this. If more than two people are talking to each other face to face you will notice that the quality of communication rapidly degrades as number of people increases.
Now imagine same group of people, trying to maintain an online conversation using a tool like GW. They would be struggling to think, comprehend, scroll to see the newest message, type their own message, cut and paste a video link, copy an image, hack each other’s sentences with simultaneous editing.
Geeks might like that. But not everyone would like that.
Way too many interactions. Way too many distractions on the screen.
GW screen looked like a glorious billboard as if designed for maximum distraction. Well who wants to be distracted while communicating?
I mentioned this before:
"We became gadget-obsessed anxiety-driven freaks and our urban society is running on a short attention span culture.Therefore I believe new collaboration tools must make every effort to take stress out from the environment.
Just about everybody, every hardware device, and every software on the Internet is desperately trying to grab the shortest possible time span dedicated to comprehension and expression."
