I just received the email below from Google. I played around with Google Wave a few times after signing up, but it never felt completely baked to me. It is kind of sad to see it go though.
Hopefully some of the Wave code wound up in new tools like Google+. Some great ideas there, though ultimately it was a solution in search of a problem.
b-b-b-bbuuutttt…h-h-hhhowww c-c-could this happen?
I remember when they announced the wave as the NEXT BIG THING, the greatest idea in human history, etc, etc…
We all had to get on board right NOW , because something unspoken but absolutely terrible would happen to those of us left behind…
After all, it was new, it was high tech, it was backed by Google (too big to fail), etc,etc.
And so… instead of the wave,with its all-encompassing connections and its infinite resources, we got 140 characters of tweets.
It’s a funny world, ain’t it 
I got the same email.
I think they did a poor job of marketing this, plus they should have kept it in the lab a few more years to get all the kinks out and add a few more features.
For a company that became popular because of the simplicity of a huge white screen with a single bar to enter searches, they seem to have forgotten that sleek, fast and easy was their calling card. Even Steven Jobs knew the products had to look good, no matter how many bells and whistles were included in his products. I am no Apple fan, but I have always admired the simplicity and clean design of every Apple product.
I am beginning to think Google is investing in programmers and techies, but has taken every artistic designer off the payroll.
In order to be able to come up with the next big thing, you have to be willing to try things nobody has tried before. The reason that nobody has tried them before is that there’s no way to know whether they’ll actually work. And when you try things that there’s no way to know whether they’ll actually work, you’ll sometimes get some that don’t.
In other words, failure is an essential component of success.
It was too damn much all at once and, as DMark said, not simple enough.
They probably used a lot of it in Google+ so it wasn’t a total loss, assuming that Google+ itself isn’t a total loss which is debatable.