No contemporary communication paradigms function really well on it. And that's a Bad Thing. Sure it's "like" email, sure it's "like" IM, sure it's "like" Google Docs, but as the combination of all of those, none of those ways of thinking about it work effectively. I can't imagine it appealing to anybody but a very small portion of people on the net. And that's a Really Bad Thing. - Chris Lasher

Dan Hagon made a good point which was to think about where the pain points are in today's processes and find the cases where Wave deals well with those. Or to put it another way, what are the use cases where the ability to collaborate are most effective. The most interesting demos will be the ones where people don't know they are using Wave though I suspect. - Cameron Neylon

Though there is another point - Wave is exactly like email in the way that people have extremely different ideas about what it is for and how to use it. Half of this discussion is people talking past each other. - Cameron Neylon

You've got a point there, Cameron. Much of the criticism I hear about Wave is really just criticism of the knocked-together client. Not much interesting is going to happen with Wave until the serious developers start playing around with it and putting some really good stuff together. Whether or not that'll happen is yet unknown, but Wave is a pretty cool tech from a protocol standpoint. The thing that it does really well is the real-time updated conflict resolution with all the different data sources and types. - Mr. Gunn