Why did Google Wave fail?

Google has dumped the Google Wave service  a real time collaboration tool which had the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, character-by-character live typing and much more. It was a innovative project from Google and got much hype in rather quick time.  A pity it had to be discontinued!

Google’s senior Vice President officially announced in the blog post, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

The one main reason for Google Wave’s failure is because of lack of promoting the product  to all levels of people from techie’s to businessmen or even students and regular internet surfers.  It was an invite-only service! In the last Google I/O conference, Google launched the Wave product. When it was launched, the official Wave page had a video which explained what Wave was; but unfortunately the video was more than a hour long. People need to understand easily and in a quicker way. From the beginning of the launch, these small but important mistakes made Wave fail.

As Google said, they don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product but the central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation they began.

There may have been other factors too which may have made Google drop  Wave.  Maybe the concept and its utility wasn’t  clear to the common user. Not much explanation on how people could get the best out of Wave, was made available. Most of the users thought it as advanced IM client. The complex user interface of Google Wave didn’t help either!

Google Wave was  one innovative product! A pity it had to die so soon!

RIP, Google wave.

Do you think there are any other reasons which may have led to the discontinuation of Google Wave? Do share!