Wave is going to be one of those things people talk about for years afterwards wondering why it failed.
In the end, it probably was two things: 1) Wave didn't fit into some neat category that people already had about stuff, and 2) Google wanted to own all the data
You are correct about #1 but #2 is way off. Where did you get that assumption? From everything that was said or done about Wave, it seemed like they have no problem with having the data be outside of Google's silos. If they wanted to control it all, why did they want to have it be federated and distributed using multiple variations of Wave or custom apps that speak the same protocol?
I contacted the development group at Google and was told the Wave server code was proprietary and they weren't giving it out. Yes, the protocol was open, and the idea was that there would be a lot of clients and such that would use it, but if a team wanted to take the server code as-is and start plugging in sensitive information? The data couldn't live in-house.
That's why several projects I had decided not to use Wave. Shame, really. I liked it a lot. I hear that the server will be made available under the Apache license, so I'm looking forward to that happening.
Google's own Wave servers probably plugged in to BigTable and who knows what other proprietary stuff. So the source code probably wouldn't have been so useful anyway.
More specifically, individual invites. They were a smart what to roll out Gmail, which could be used on an individual basis (i.e. I don't need all my friends to sign up before I can start using it).
But isolated invites to a collaboration platform? That is jaw-droppingly thoughtless. Had Google adapted the strategy to the product by ensuring that invites went to people who already worked together as a group (i.e. established partners on a research project, members of the same design agency etc.), then the fate of Wave may have been very different.
But by making such a galacticly dumb opening move, they left smart people wondering "what other major problems have gone totally unaddressed? And do I want to invest an hour? a day? an entire weekend? to find out? By myself?"
And with that, they lost all support from the early adopters willing and able to validate the concept, replacing it with a bunch of bad buzz (no pun intended) that poisoned the whole thing.
Definitely. I got a Wave invite and had no one to use it with. Each new Wave user should've received a few invites to send immediately to the folks they'd want to collaborate with.
In the end, it probably was two things: 1) Wave didn't fit into some neat category that people already had about stuff, and 2) Google wanted to own all the data