It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.
If someone buys a Fire Phone and it gets discontinued - well, products getting discontinued is part of life and it doesn't (usually) affect the usage of the one you have.
If Google builds a web service, then that service has the chance to grow to 50m / 100m users before deciding that it is not worth supporting. Law of large numbers says of those 50/100m a non-trivial proportion will invest substantial time in it and get pissed off when they have to make alternative plans.
If Amazon killed Prime Video or Audible, I bet you’d see a pretty huge outcry.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Also because as humans, we're generally more inclined to dogpile onto the Goliath and root for the David. Underdogs almost always get treated more leniently.
When a shop stops selling a product, you can still keep using the product you have. They don't take it away from you.
AWS would beg to differ.
However, Amazon has been very good at not getting rid of AWS services so it's reputation is that it's at scale services are going to stay safe.
Maybe it's because we know Google is profiting off of our private information, and we don't make a stink about that because they're giving us free stuff. But why shouldn't we be upset when they stop giving us the free stuff we like? They're still profiting off of our private information aren't they?
Amazon just isn't in the same boat.
The fact that not only the idea but also the implementation and the hype and the marketing were all available completely for free and no one ever turned it into a real product tells me that it wasn't a real product.
I would not at all be surprised if something Wave-ish became a huge deal someday, not would I be surprised if a dozen companies tried it and failed before someone makes it work.
Google completely botched the roll-out. Wave is essentially useless without others to use it with (no value above Google Docs to use it solo, or standard email/IM to chat with others). I had 10 invites, I sent most of them out. Only two people of the 7 or 8 I invited received their invites. It was completely useless to me because one of the two was someone who just wanted an invite (but I didn't interact with much), and the other was an fellow tabletop gamer and the rest of our group couldn't get in.
When Google finally opened it (looked up dates, I remembered it was short but didn't recall it being this short) to the general public it was May 2010. They announced that they were going to stop developing it (switch to sustainment with plans to shut it down) in August 2010. They gave the service 3 months, and said it didn't have sufficient interest.
No shit, it was three-damned-months!
As best I can tell, someone at Google had intended to shut it down from the start. The fact that their attempt to launch it failed doesn't mean that the system (or its concept) had no potential. But killing it did kill the potential, because you needed that critical mass to gain any value from it.
It had federation which would've been useful, but with no public instance there was little reason for a small group to run their own instance. There was no one to talk to.