Comment by mpixel

It had multiple angles it could succeed on really.

It had two major issues.

The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.

The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.

You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.

You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.

You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.

And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.