Official line
Failed to achieve the user adoption we had hoped for.
Google · Productivity · Product
Google Wave
Discontinued
2009–2012 · 3 years in market
Launched
May 27, 2009
Discontinued
Apr 30, 2012
Cause of death
Too early / too late
Evidence
High
What was it?
A real-time collaborative document that tried to replace email, chat, and wikis at once. Brilliant, baffling, and dead in three years.
Why it died
Supported by a primary source
It was a new primitive with no mental model. Demos dazzled; daily use did not. Too many jobs in one surface.
Founder takeaway
If you need a 90-minute keynote to explain the product, you do not have a product. Ship one verb, then expand.
Sources
High — primary source on file
What replaced it
Google
Google Docs
Live cursors without the identity crisis.
Notion
Notion
The all-in-one doc Wave sketched, a decade later.
Related graves
Same company, category, or cause of death.
RIP
Google Offers
2011–2013 · 2 yrs
Google’s Groupon clone, launched at the peak of daily-deal mania and gone with the bubble.
Commerce/Too early / too late+40
RIP
Google Catalogs
2011–2015 · 4 yrs
Digitized print catalogs. A museum of a dying medium.
Commerce/Too early / too late+3
RIP
Google Reader
2005–2013 · 8 yrs
The RSS reader a generation of journalists and power users treated as a daily driver. Killed as RSS faded and Google chased social.
Media & Publishing/Low usage+39
RIP
Google Trips
2016–2019 · 3 yrs
Offline travel itineraries from Gmail reservations. Folded into Maps and Assistant.
Maps & Local/Replaced by successor+37