all comes back to genius theory. certain members of wave's board appeared to encourage the ceo to think of himself as a genius. that the supply side is where the action is. that the product is not at fault, the market needs to be educated. that paradigms can be shifted by a grand idea. that home runs are where the action and the glamour is.
sometimes the supply side idea works. but not so often in a complex, sensitive, social environment.
in this case, the supply side model failed. complex ecosystems tend to be hard to shift. incumbents are hard to displace. you have to work with them if you want to change the environments they control. adaptation is the rule. smaller steps are more likely to work than big ones. demand tends to pull a product into the market so you need to build what customers want.
wave was surely right to customise its eras product to begin with. it would have done this to learn. but it kinda seems they never learnt how to customise their way to a standard, scaleable solution. my hypothesis is that they failed because the original product had too large a scope. it ran into issues of incumbency. folks in mobile were worried that their cash flows and customer control were in the balance. system administrators saw their delicately created systems being subject to toppling and resisted wave's software.
the writing on the wall was in the income statement. at the time, the company didn't reveal why it repeatedly failed to deliver. but investors could see that it wasn't fixing its problems. the lack of traction continued. the sales velocity declined. leading to yet more attempts to get a foothold in the market with new software.
wave wasn't sprague's creature. it was gilder's. it is the baleful influence of genius theory that seemed to make wave arrogant in its approach to the market. if any approach can yield a better outcome, solms' can. but no one is such a magician that they can take the mountain to the market.
