On 28 May 2009, Google demoed a product called Wave on stage at I/O for 80 minutes and got a standing ovation from developers who had no idea what they had just watched, and 15 months later the company quietly shut it down because almost nobody could explain to a friend what it was actually for (opens in new tab)

Lars Rasmussen stood on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on 28 May 2009 and spent roughly 80 minutes showing a room of developers a product called Google Wave, and when he finished, thousands of people stood up and clapped. The demo had everything: real-time character-by-character typing visible to other participants, drag-and-drop photo […]