You're looking at it wrong. Think of the Google Wave group as being a startup within google. And also remember that only a small fraction of Google users have

You're looking at it wrong. Think of the Google Wave group as being a startup within google. And also remember that only a small fraction of Google users have heard of Google Wave. It only looms large in the geekosphere, where the plugged in people who look at every new thing and have an opinion about it, live. In the rest of the world it's about as interesting as Knol. My own take is that the wave protocol is very interesting from a technical standpoint, but that it has yet to find it's audience from business/UX standpoint. And I'm glad that Google wants to fund work in this area.