[JepZ]

I still miss Wave... In my opinion, Googles biggest failure was the missing real-world federation. They promised us, that there will be a server to run on your own hardware and yet it took them years to release anything that was usable. Even years after the open source release the software was quite unstable.

Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.

[Cthulhu_]

Personally, visual clutter and poor performance were two major factors why Wave didn't work for me. Visually they were cramming too much stuff on the page, with loads of avatars / icons for participants and the like - IMO unnecessary information to have on the landing page. And performance wise it was just not good enough, maybe if they made it an optimized native app instead of a webapp.

At least they could incorporate the tech they developed and used for Wave in other products, notably Docs and G+.