Wave solved problems I encountered in commercial (large scale corporations) work.<p>It could prevent "submarining" of communication into email chains and instant messaging conversations inaccessible to those not addressed or cc-ed, also preventing the time-burning, frustrating, and often incomplete "email dive" someone would have to perform to find and forward all these emails to e.g. a new team member or another interested party (new manager, legal, possibly even a third party).<p>Add people to the project/communications' access list(s), and they not only gained participation (without eveyone having to remember to add them to the list of addressees on new emails) but also access to the historical record.<p>It enabled team-level permissions for both on-boarding and off-boarding of new parties: New team members, etc -- like above. Note the off-boarding facility, in that; short of termination, if someone left a project, you (normal PM or dev lead or whatever roll) could take them off the access lists for the shared communications and you could all go your separate ways with a clean, definable and documented break.<p>And a bunch of stuff that's long since left my immediately accessible, conscious memory.<p>(Alternatives I saw did not compare. E.g. "project documentation skeletons" expanded from Lotus Notes templates, that left ginormous subtrees of "forms" that were often very sparsely, if at all, completed -- said completion being entirely, manually dependent upon the individual doing the work. Finding any bit of information in those was a giant PIA; who knows into which form they entered it, if at all, and even when they did, it was surrounded by tons of boilerplate that made it disappear into that "haystack".)<p>BUT...<p>They let front end development hang this very Javascript-heavy UI on it that bogged down "normal" machines, making the end-user experience rather miserable. That "lag" (to be generous in description), combined with a healthy dose of "mystery meat" UI.<p>People hated that. And they stayed away. (If you could even talk them into giving the beta a try... once they had access to the beta...)<p>Maybe it ran fine on internal "Core++" or whatever, ueber-motherboard and maxed RAM Google machines with local hops to the server. But no-one inside seemed to give it a good hard run in the "real world". Or to worry about said performance problems, if they did.<p>Well, I never got invested in it, other than hope and poking at it a bit once someone gave me access. But I continued to think, for a good long while, that the end result was a shame.<p>P.S. This is just my personal, outsider perspective. Maybe I have some things wrong. But it's the impression I ended up with.