It wasn't obvious to me what it was for or how to use it, no-one I knew personally was using it, and I don't have the free time to casually learn an entire new paradigm to do... whatever it was you did with Wave.
Google wave is not really that complex, first thing to do before using it is to watch the video demo (I'm almost sure very few peoples did it), it's a collaboration and productivity tool, so you just can't invite your friends to use it at this stage, you can invite your colleagues and employess, but it's not a product targeting any casual Joe friend, but google seems to expect peoples to adopt it as such. You probably won't ask your friends to use a task management tool to keep in touch with you or what you do. I'm glad it may stick around for sometime,I hope forever, too bad, they will no more work on it.
Would you care more or less if Wave was made by a startup instead of a massive existing company like Google?
New products fail all the time. When the company making the product fails to even explain what the product does and just heaps buzzwords together I don't feel any sense of loss when the product goes away. This wouldn't even be newsworthy if it wasn't Google behind it.