Unfortunate. I’ve been using Wave daily for the last six months or so and I’ve really come to rely on it for project management and collaboration stuff. I was actually gearing up to write a Wave primer for all the folks involved in my next comics project when I heard the news.

Personally, I think Wave failed because of a combination of unclear messaging (“What does it do?” “Everything!” “No, seriously, what does it do?” “Everything!”), and the bizarre decision to go invite-only for an app that’s useless unless everyone else is using it, too. Plus it really took a beating in the initial reviews, most of which centered around how confusing and seemingly purposeless it was [again, poor messaging]. The thing got a bad reputation straight out of the gate, and I don’t think it ever recovered. All those reasons aside, though, I’m going with “ahead of its time” as the real reason it died. Yeah. You know, like that invention in that one movie.