Personally, I've never been surprised at Wave's apparent failure. To me, it was no different than any other attempt at a "revolutionary idea" that didn't work l

Personally, I've never been surprised at Wave's apparent failure. To me, it was no different than any other attempt at a "revolutionary idea" that didn't work later in another revision or iteration (I think Hacker News readers understand this very well;a poor analogy would be a Microsoft Tablet and an iPad). A lot of discussion about it's failure is a direct result of Google's status and the amount of resources required to come up with a product like wave. When I consider Wave in retrospect, I really think they limped in on this . It was a grand experiment. If they really wanted this to succeed, I don't think they would have proceeded with the launch the way they did. Reading the Quora answer sort of jives with this. I'm surprised no discussion touched upon the Anonymous response in the Quora thread. It's more interesting than "why Wave failed" and is indicative of the state of Google. It brings an additional perspective to the discussion around Google's (apparent) talent retention problems. Combined with other anecdotal evidence, it really look like Google is at a loss for how to continually motivate employees with their current organizational structure