I might suggest that Wave and Vista are obvious projects Google and Microsoft wrote and below a standard of quality, and akin to a bad movie from WB. Google+ and Windows 8 could be considered bad sequels.
I don't think either Wave nor Vista were poor quality products, same way I don't think Glass nor Phone were poor products. The engineering on all of these is fine for the most part. Sure, there are bugs, but not really any more than usual. The real problem is that nobody really wanted these products in the first place.
For Wave, most users didn't seem to figure out what Wave was actually useful for (and it didn't help that Google wasn't sure either). For Vista, people liked XP and dragging them kicking and screaming into a software upgrade turned out to be really hard. Vista set the architectural foundation for future Windows releases, and Microsoft had an obligation to take people off of what was then a 5-year-old operating system - much like OS X 10.0 attempted to do. Nobody seems to pay much attention to the fact that 10.0 was incredibly buggy and took quite some time to bring up to a usable state.
Vista was just bad marketing. After that whole fiasco Microsoft did market tests where they presented consumers with a "new version" of Windows that was actually just Vista, and they got a positive response. And even if you don't believe that story completely, the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista and yet got just as popular as XP was says a lot.
>the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista
Say what now? I don't know if you remember but Vista had really high hardware requirements. When Vista came out, it was fundamentally unusable for me. Hardware requirements is literally the first section of criticism in Vista's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#Hardware_require...):
>For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented, "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine" because his laptop's lack of an appropriate graphics chip so hobbled Vista.
Windows 7 made substantial performance improvements in comparison to the widespread hardware incompatibilities that Vista had.
For Wave, most users didn't seem to figure out what Wave was actually useful for (and it didn't help that Google wasn't sure either). For Vista, people liked XP and dragging them kicking and screaming into a software upgrade turned out to be really hard. Vista set the architectural foundation for future Windows releases, and Microsoft had an obligation to take people off of what was then a 5-year-old operating system - much like OS X 10.0 attempted to do. Nobody seems to pay much attention to the fact that 10.0 was incredibly buggy and took quite some time to bring up to a usable state.