When Google announced Wave the hype was immense, it was like everyone took Gmail and squared it and thought it would be that awesome! And basically that’s what the Wave developers thought too. Well I can’t remember what I did but I got an invite and hopped on, and right away realised that there was no-one there. The invite-only start (for performance reasons) limited the appeal and usefulness of Wave.
Because I think it was pretty useful, at least once they got the early kinks worked out. Me and some far-flung mates used it to plan some trips together, and Wave was pretty useful for that. It would have been better with a mobile interface but it was decent.
The thing is, Wave wasn’t the next coming of Gmail, it was the next coming of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is merely the front-end to Exchange, which does all the boring and useful bits (routing email, planning calendars etc). And sure, it works, but not very well. At my current place of work we have Office Communicator Server (OCS) which is basically MS Live Messenger in a corporate suit. The nice thing about OCS is that it integrates into Exchange, so you can see whether a coworker is online, or in a meeting or whatever.
However, sometimes you want to start from the task, not the person. That’s where Wave began - you had a project, or a trip, or just a task involving some people. It could start with just you and then expand, like a lot of tasks do. However, instead of snowballing into a long mail thread, you actually had the option of keeping Waves clean and on topic.
Wave was flawed - it was before its time, it tried to solve problems that don’t often turn up in the wider world of the web, but which do turn up lots of times within organizations. Maybe Microsoft will learn from Wave and build better collaboration tools than Exchange.