[TillE]

Google Wave is an interesting case study because they identified a real problem (email sucks), came up with some really cool open technology, but never quite put it together in the right way. The web client was slow and clunky, and they probably weren't focused on the right things.

A few years later, Slack comes along solving the same problem in a different way, and now platforms like that are the overwhelmingly popular choice for group communication.

[Cthulhu_]

Wave was ahead of its time and over-eager, but technology coming from it made its way into Google's other products for real-time collaboration at least.

[JohnFen]

Wave is the one that I think of the most because I first heard of it a couple of months before my company was about to release a product that did an extremely similar thing. We didn't want to go toe-to-toe with Google on anything, so immediately dropped the entire project.

Wave's failure meant that I'll forever regret that decision.

[moralestapia]

The way they released Wave was so bad that it should be a case study in marketing about what not to do if you want a product to succeed.

[Jtsummers]

Their release approach was probably the key issue, besides the technical issues (primarily performance as I recall), that killed that project. I had access within a couple months of its release and had some number of invitations (single digit, 4 or 5?). I sent them all out, but the invitations were a lie. Invitations added your invitee to a pool of people who would one day, maybe, get an invitation if they won the lottery.

The result was that I was using a collaboration tool with no collaborators. By the time they announced they were killing it (about 15 months after launch, perhaps a year after I sent out my invitations), no one I invited had received access to the system. This crippled adoption for everyone who was interested in it, and reduced Google's interest in trying to salvage the system by dumping money into the engineering side (and Google already liked to kill products even by that point in their history).

[etrautmann]

and yet are still truly awful to use.