Wave Goodbye

A couple of days ago Google announced they would no longer be developing Wave as a standalone product and would only guarantee to keep it running until the end of the year.  I'm not particularly surprised as it was never very clear what the service was good for and it was not the most intuitive of things to use.  I think 2 key points come out of this:

1. For users - web/cloud services have many advantages over traditional software but the user is at the mercy of the provider.   If they pull the plug then you're stuffed.
2. For Google - rapidly launching, developing and sometimes withdrawing services is good for innovation on the web but if users start to lose confidence in the permanence of services they will be reluctant to invest the time and effort in learning how to use them.  This is particularly true for the corporate market where time is money.  There is already a strong reluctance among many corporate IT managers to migrate services to the web and, for those that were aware of Wave, this won't have helped.