I was just reading a thread about Google Wave on Seloc where someone posted this pic – seems pretty accurate to me so far!
There are clearly some very clever ideas in Wave, and I can see some of them being very useful… but will it ever replace email? Not sure to be honest… whilst email is old tech, its strength is that everyone on the internet has an email address, and probably knows how to use it to send and receive messages. Will Wave ever be that ubiquitous?
Giving away the server component is probably a good start, and I guess embedding it into GMail would probably help too. But even with a free server component, how may clients will there be? Will people want to check their email and their waves? I have to admit when I first looked at Wave I wondered if I could set it up to send me an email alert when there was an update… then realised that was probably missing Google’s point :)