Comment by roc

16 years ago

The incredibly powerful, federated, open protocol/platform was what excited us geeks.

The client always sucked and was, at the most generous, a tech demo of things the protocol/platform was capable of.

And the problem is that the client is what Google marketed.

The client should have been nothing but a tech demo. The potential power of Wave was in that it could move totally arbitrary data between independently federated servers, and had support for robots that could manipulate that data in arbitrary ways.

It could have been a Facebook/Twitter/Flicker/Whatever killer, but Google got tied down with working on the bloated UI rather than building out the platform and letting others handle the frontend of it.