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I think failures of projects such as this can be attributed to wrongly applying lean principles instead of coming out with a more complete offering. Checkout never really matured as a product and therefore made for a poor PayPal or merchant account alternative.

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As a former Google Checkout/Wallet employee, this is completely right. When Checkout was first released, companies would get free AdWords credit to sign up and use the service. Also, non-profits got free processing. After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. There were no updates and improvements made. The only changes were when patches and bug fixes for problems that affected a large amount of customers (not surprising since it is impossible to fix every issues that affects every customer, but when you are dealing with a product that some companies solely use to make a living you better try hard to fix as many problems as possible).

> After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward.

That describes so many Google services. Some live on anyway, because for whatever reasons they meet Google's interests to keep running (Google Books). Some don't.

Agreed. I think there was a period of like 5 years soon after they launched it big, where they did almost nothing to improve it or promote it. Same goes for Google Docs. I think only like a little more than 2 years ago they started caring about Google Docs again, probably because of Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Before that the development for it felt very dry for years, too.

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