Despite the hype... I don't think Wave failed. I blame all of 'us' (where 'us' is defined as alpha geeks, silicon valley startup folks, techies, etc) for this misrepresentation. We all this products must be wildly successful with millions of users or it has failed... we tend to see failure and success as this very black and white / binary thing... but it's not.

Google is probably discontinuing use of Wave because it didn't live up to their expectations and didn't have as many users as they need it to in order for it to be viable. If this were created by a smaller company, however, it could still be considered successful... I haven't been able to find any numbers on how many active users wave has but I'd guess somewhere around 50k - 100k... For any smaller company that'd be a huge success...

I'm really tired of reading all of the rhetoric that acts as if it's just oh so obvious that Wave isn't a good product. For 50k users it's a great product that they love... It doesn't need to have 2 million users to be a good product... Personally, I think Wave is a BRILLIANT piece of software and I use it exclusively for communication with my 6-10 close personal friends.

I have one gripe - the mobile interface is terrible... Maybe if this could've been fixed more people would've used it.