Google Wave

Cause of death

Killed by indifference

Made by

Google

Google stopped development barely a year in, after users proved unable to explain what it was for.

Wave merged email, chat, and document editing into one live-updating object, and its demo was genuinely dazzling. The problem was that nobody could say what problem it solved, including the people who liked it. Google halted development in August 2010, roughly a year after the preview opened, and finally switched the service off in 2012. Several of its ideas resurfaced later inside Google Docs, which is the usual afterlife for an interesting failure.