Briefly (I need to run), when it was announced/described, I saw it solving a lot of problems I've encountered:
Submarining discussions and decisions (e.g. email's that don't include the whole group or that don't get shared with new members joining the group).
Excessive work to reconstruct discussions, events, decisions. (Again, "big wads of emails" being a typical example.)
Centralized, rigid access controls. (You have to go through systems administration to add somebody to a project. Sometimes, that in turn means management sign off. Quickly, you're back to copy/pasting crap into, oh, for example, email.)
Wasted time. For example, the last three points.
Lack of dynamic, group discussion separate from physical and chronological synchronization and separate from the need for productivity killing meetings. Some companies have (finally) caught onto internal bulletin boards and the like, for this. But then somebody has to set them up, add users and credentials, and centralize a whole lot of bureaucratic decisions that might better be pushed out to the teams involved.
Lack of a centralized, uniform project communication history.
Etc.
Anyway, Wave seemed promising. But the client Google offered up was unusable for most people. It was literally too slow, at first, on the client side. It reflected the worst of Google's trend to abandon discoverability in its UI. (I'm reminded of this in a smaller fashion every time I help a client's employee take the dive into their calendar product. I'd argue that Android has a fair amount of it, too.)
Also, early adopters would join and have no one to work with. Even when you could get someone else invited, most didn't want to tackle it. Growth stagnated.
I still think Wave' paradigm solves a lot of problems. Maybe Apache and third parties will have better luck producing a usable client.
P.S. There were also many niggles and problems with the UI, such as default decisions about account creation and account information sharing. The UI was, basically, quite underdone. Finally, Google didn't continue to pour effort into it nor give it enough time to take off.
Submarining discussions and decisions (e.g. email's that don't include the whole group or that don't get shared with new members joining the group).
Excessive work to reconstruct discussions, events, decisions. (Again, "big wads of emails" being a typical example.)
Centralized, rigid access controls. (You have to go through systems administration to add somebody to a project. Sometimes, that in turn means management sign off. Quickly, you're back to copy/pasting crap into, oh, for example, email.)
Wasted time. For example, the last three points.
Lack of dynamic, group discussion separate from physical and chronological synchronization and separate from the need for productivity killing meetings. Some companies have (finally) caught onto internal bulletin boards and the like, for this. But then somebody has to set them up, add users and credentials, and centralize a whole lot of bureaucratic decisions that might better be pushed out to the teams involved.
Lack of a centralized, uniform project communication history.
Etc.
Anyway, Wave seemed promising. But the client Google offered up was unusable for most people. It was literally too slow, at first, on the client side. It reflected the worst of Google's trend to abandon discoverability in its UI. (I'm reminded of this in a smaller fashion every time I help a client's employee take the dive into their calendar product. I'd argue that Android has a fair amount of it, too.)
Also, early adopters would join and have no one to work with. Even when you could get someone else invited, most didn't want to tackle it. Growth stagnated.
I still think Wave' paradigm solves a lot of problems. Maybe Apache and third parties will have better luck producing a usable client.
P.S. There were also many niggles and problems with the UI, such as default decisions about account creation and account information sharing. The UI was, basically, quite underdone. Finally, Google didn't continue to pour effort into it nor give it enough time to take off.