Comment by jodrellblank
16 years ago
Whatever the merits of the over-arching idea, the actual implementation and the thing you got to use, frankly, blew. An interesting technology demo, maybe but as an actual product it was a horrendous, inscrutable, clunky mess. [] This remains true despite the fact that there exist a few merry bands of hyper-intelligent and/or masochistic mutants who have managed to get some use out of it.
I think you've just described >50% of all software.
Or more. But most software doesn't get the coverage Google Wave had. We tend not to theorize at length why obviously terrible software fails, we just say 'oh that thing? yeah it sucked' and move on. I'm just making a simple point - Wave wasn't successful because it wasn't very good.