As the Net reverberates with commentary on the demise of Google Wave (not without a soupçon of schadenfreude), it occurs to me that Google might have done better with Wave if it had presented it as a narrow-focus tool for group authoring/editing — and then allowed us users to discover, much to our delight, that it could also be used for a zillion other things! Wowie!
By hyping Wave as a technology that would enable not only group editing, but also hypermedia, plug-ins, social networking, a replacement for email, carpet cleaner, and cures tooth decay! they left users at a loss to figure out what actually to do with Wave, and with whom to do it.
That does sound like a much better approach. Geekliness sometimes gets the better of Google. (E.g. Buzz).