I was always very excited about wave, and was looking forward to a time when it was in common use. The possibility to unify all my communication around common threads makes sense, being able to use it as a replacement for chat & email - as it has properties of both - and pulling in external sources like documents, lists, PM tools, tickers ...

However, Google definitely messed up the execution of it's release to the general public, it never got any critical mass and the concept was presented in too abstract a way for most people to get it and therefore try to use it, but I can see how a large organisation, such as those discussed above, could pick it up and deploy it internally with success.