The network effect was what was wrong with Google Wave, which was better than email in practically every way.
If it had been possible to send a Wave to an email address (some sort of embedding?) and receive email to your Wave address, I think it would have succeeded in replacing email.
Instead, for reasons I'll never understand, Google tried to replicate the limited number of invitations system that had worked for Gmail, despite the fact that only having a limited number of people you could communicate with made the product effectively useless.
It worked for Gmail because you could send email from Gmail to anywhere, and receive it from anywhere! Missing that Wave was fundamentally different to me is one of the worst tech marketing failures I've seen.
Only one of my Wave invites went out, and to a person who I saw nearly every day but didn't communicate with electronically. I invited my sister, classmates, and some friends who I regularly communicated and collaborated with electronically, none of them ever got in before it was shutdown. It was very frustrating because for one person it had limited utility (may as well just use Google Docs or Dropbox), and I had no community to interact with within Wave.
If it had been possible to send a Wave to an email address (some sort of embedding?) and receive email to your Wave address, I think it would have succeeded in replacing email.
Instead, for reasons I'll never understand, Google tried to replicate the limited number of invitations system that had worked for Gmail, despite the fact that only having a limited number of people you could communicate with made the product effectively useless.
It worked for Gmail because you could send email from Gmail to anywhere, and receive it from anywhere! Missing that Wave was fundamentally different to me is one of the worst tech marketing failures I've seen.