Was a Wave user, and to this day I can't believe Google botched their opportunity to build their Slack/Teams years before those products existed. Of course, hindsight blah blah.
Still, this tells me having the right ideas or the technology has nothing to do with releasing a "right"/successful product.
It’s classic big company syndrome. Stupid performance processes, obsessions with metrics above all else, the MBAfication of the entire leadership chain. It’s basically impossible to build a good product in this environment. All big tech has this - they succeed through acquisition and anti competitive approaches instead.
My (admittedly sketchy) memory of Wave was that it felt like a tech demo rather than an end user app. There's probably a market for it as -a-service in the modern cloud world managing distributed interaction.
I tried to use Wave to collaborate on a blog post with friends, rather than emailing each other critiques.
They thought it seemed to complicated and stuck with email.
I’m haphazarding a guess that maybe Google didn’t stick with it because, if I recall, most if not all of their services were free and this one probably cost a lot to run without a clear monetization strategy. If it didn’t increase the size of a captive audience, and they weren’t willing to show ads in the product itself, and they weren’t going to get better data from users to inform their ad services elsewhere…why run it?
Of course that’s all speculation.
I think this is a meaningfully different variation on the "Google doesn't commit to their products" convo. If we look at the subset of those where, retrospectively, we see that others enter the same space executed successfully and built big businesses, it's a new way of articulating Google's collapse of strategic vision.
Wave is a good example. I think Stadia is another one, they checked out right as handheld gaming started taking off. Probably others once you start looking through everything.