They did try to provide an open platform with Wave, which was amazing, powerful, innovative, open source and decentralized. And it failed. I wish it hadn't; I liked it a lot.
+1 totally agree. Wave was really good. I sometimes use Apache Wave, but not having the combined AppEngine support for Wave Robots makes Apache Wave less useful for my interests.
It isn't clear to me why no startup has built a product on the Wave code or concept.