[iamgilesbowkett]

the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email.

I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple isn't going as badly as the constant catch-up game Google Plus (and Wave, and whatever they called the other one) plays with Facebook.

but seriously, business failure can happen for so many reasons, it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless of course you see a string of people failing at the same thing.

[chrisrhoden]

Woah. Google Wallet failed because they didn't already have accounts for everyone when they launched it. Paypal was the only competitor but they didn't offer anything paypal didn't already offer, and everyone was already on paypal.

> pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email.

I can see that you're having some difficulty with google recently, but you can't actually believe this. What about Maps? Saying that maps is search because it has search built in means we can call GMail search too. What about Calendar?

> I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple

This is where the snark starts to bother me. Let's acknowledge that Apple made a phone with a big glass touchscreen before Google. What, since then, has been a great innovation that Android has rushed to rip off?

[krzyk]

Android half a failure? You must be joking, it's one of their greatest successes. Look around you, for sure you will see at least one person using an android phone.

And what about the ads? They were probably the first company that started making real money with them online.

Google Maps? When I want to find a place I use it, are there any other products that provide a good coverage of almost the whole world (and my little village)?

[icebraining]

pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email.

AdSense? Youtube?

Also, Google Reader is the leader in its (admittedly small) space. And I'm pretty sure so is Google News. Oh, and Google Maps.

[aychedee]

Android is a success. It is the new dominant commodity operating system.

[shrub]

Wave was scraped a while ago and taken completely offline just recently. I loved the per-character live action, but the rest of the UX was non-revolutionary and mostly a disaster.