"Now, I don't mean to imply that Wave did not have some very smart engineers working on the UI, we certainly did. But talent is different from experience. The latter is a guard against 3.5MB of compressed, minified, inlined Javascript. Against 6 minute compiles to see CSS changes in browser. Against giving up on IE support (at the time, over 60% of browser market share) because it was simply too difficult. Against Safari running out of memory as soon as Wave was opened on an iPad."

I wonder how much of the failure was this sort of thing vs just having a product that people didn't understand. (I definitely agree that if the UI had been simple and snappy it would have been better)

On the bright side, I feel pretty confident that some real startup will take the open sourced Wave technology and do something good...