This makes me super sad, and I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not. Here's why:
1) Awesome hype with too-long beta and too-few invites.
2) Little reason to switch.
First off, I love Google Wave. I was so stoked when they first released it, especially when I finally got my invite. Unfortunately I didn't get any invites initially. This was a problem because I couldn't share my excitement with any friends or family other than to say "This is so cool! ... but I don't have anyone I can use it with..." So that sucked. And when I did get my invites it was only about three of them. Sure, eventually they rolled out tons of invites, but it took a while to get everyone set up.
The biggest problem, however, is that there was really little reason to switch to wave. With GMail, it was compatible with your friends on Linux, Windows - whether they used Hotmail, Yahoo, Eudora, or Pine. But if you wanted to use Google Wave it meant anyone that you wanted to use Wave with had to switch. They had to switch from their email or their IM, and that was the killer. If my email works "okay", and my IM works perfectly well, why should I switch to Wave? For me, because it was awesome, but your average user isn't going to want to switch when everything else works well enough. If they wanted to have better adoption, they should have built-in the ability to send emails and/or IMs. And if they put a link at the end of the email, like "Try Google Wave", then it would have been great advertisement.
Unfortunately there was no such thing, and thus ends Wave, and that's sad.
RIP Google Wave.
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