My ex-Googler friend and I (both of us developers) excitedly started using Wave together, but soon gave up. It was neat, but we couldn't think of anything we needed it for. So this isn't a matter of ignorance.

I was, however, happy to see that some of the cool parts, like simultaneous realtime editing, made their way into Google Docs.

I'm guessing he needs a product to be intuitive enough that he doesn't need a marketing person to tell him how to use it. Wave was pretty far from that.