Innovative first mover and absence of demand, unfortunately, go hand in hand.
Two technologies were being pursued, Datacasting and TC. Neither enjoyed demand. Both saw efforts (according to plympton's insights)to build a field of dreams. One appears to have stuck, the other apparently not.
So, from a strictly field of dreams angle, its difficult to discriminate between either effort in there inception and pursuit. As a shareholder, Monday morning quarterbacking falls well within my purview, and I judge that Wave management showedd poor judgement, poor restraint, and reckless use of resources and ran the Xpress train well past anything resembling tracks.
Nevertheless, from a historical perspective I question whether one can assert that either, from a development company perspective, enjoyed an extant market.
While TC may well have appeared more inevitable than Datacasting, that its form would be a broader open standard solution versus a few proprietary incumbent vendors was a crap shoot.
Both saw demand in a theoretical sense, and neither in a practical sense. Both had well funded massive constituencies that want the field built. Given that Wave founding was based on a variant of datacasting (DRM more or less) with a trusted root, the two projects were conceptually intertwined from the beginning. Once Wave transitioned away from its own proprietary visions (Petermeter and E2) towards more vendor neutral open standards, the time to make a break was evident. They did not. That sort of vision discipline certainly raises concerns, but I'm disinclined to agree with you that they were so disparate in origin. Its the sort of risk-reward analysis and feasibility study that may well more frequently occur were management and shareholder interests more closely aligned.
I still see Wave as two companies, the first one, Peter's, as failed ... and a resurgent torch being carried by Michael from the ashes of that ruin. I see the second company as SKS', where the platform itself rather than the content was the vehicle to success. Scrabmls is returning to the content arena in some ways, but just a segment of DLP in others. If scrambls morphs and imbeds into the suite of DLP tools and becomes a largely invisible plug-in under the dominion of ERAS for handling content for storage in places other than removable media and hard drives, then it would seem to fit within the whole. I'd rather not hear about it as a FB overlay, but as a dropbox manager. On that, I think it is missing the enterprise play and not articulating what it may more reasonably and modestly be.
Visions need discipline.
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