I was saddened to hear that Google is ceasing development of Google Wave. I was excited to try it as soon as I saw the video demonstration Google released on their website. Sadly, once I actually started using Wave, I realized that it was an amazing piece of technology that just didn't work as a standalone product. It was rare that I could come up with a use for Wave that couldn't be done just as easily in Gmail. The biggest problem, though, was one the author of the linked article above points out:
Staggered invite releases can make sense for certain product launches. It made sense for Gmail, considering the amount of storage each user was getting (relative to the other webmail services at the time) and consideration for scaling and spam issues. The same can be said for Google Voice. However, for a tool like Wave, which is by definition a collaborative tool, it really needed to be launched to a large audience.It may not have been feasible for Google to push Wave out to the entire world on the first shot, but there is absolutely no good reason it took nine months to go from initial invites to open access. Not when you add four months of hype in front of the initial launch. Had Google waited to make sure it had the resources to scale and support Wave or to bring it to Google Apps users before launching the product, the company might have better capitalized on the early hype
My hope is that Google will fold many of Wave's features into Gmail over the coming years, although they've all ready used some of the technology in other Google products. In the meantime, though Zenbe Shareflow doesn't do quite everything that Wave does, it seems a bit easier to use.
