cm, you make some good points.
While some see the government as an "innovation backwater," you and anyone who has followed the development of many of our most innovative new technologies in aerospace, medicine, energy, IT, etc. can acknowledge their important role in partnership with the private sector, particularly through R&D. In the end, Wave's survival and eventual success will have been a result of long term nurturing and demand from the NSA and DoD. Another key is that I don't believe Dell would have kept Wave on board as long as they did if they hadn't seen the direction the government wanted to take, and the government is proportionally a larger source of revenue for Dell than it is for HP.
I don't know about entrenched commercial interests being responsible for Wave's financing struggles in light of all the time it took to develop confidence-inspiring revenues, however if one were ever able to determine the existence of "commercial warfare" then Wave may have beeen bloodied in battle but are now on track to winning the war.