It wasn't only marketing. Either the codebase was bad or the browsers at the time were not powerful enough for it. I remember using it for a uni project and after a few messages got into the history, it kept getting slower and slower. At some point it took seconds of lag between the key presses and the result.

As great as wave was, it didn't work very well either.

Yeah I'm not even sure that pitching it for business productivity would have been enough. The reasons it shines: chat, collaborative editing, blurred lines between documents, emails, and chat – those are built on concepts that didn't exist back then. We can see the value of it now precisely because we've had the intermediate stage of Slack/Docs/Gmail/etc. If that doesn't mean "ahead of its time" I don't know what does.

> I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off.

I wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.