Matte, unless you don't have lights or ever see the sun.

In college environment, you have little control over the lighting conditions and the glossy screen means you have to fiddle with the positioning to avoid the "mirror" effect. That is unless you have someone attractive sitting behind you whom you want to watch. But they will see you staring.

I never found out what Google Wave was for, so it is really not a big loss.

That's the problem with googlewave, it's a productivity tool, for some reasons, google tried to sell it to the casual Joe, to use it as.....I don't really know, I love google wave and have been using it as a CSCW ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_supported_cooperative_... ), this is not a product that should fail, I think it's more a marketing and strategy problem here, the last thing to do with google wave is to kill it. So google decision's makers, this is not a product to use like Gmail, this is a product for work, and since this "work" tool is out there during a recesssion, well don't expect it to take off like a rocket, give it some time, it's a great innovating tool. For the slowness, Hner, keep in mind this tool is still a beta product. I use it almost everyday and love it.

Do people really think like this?

It wasn't obvious to me what it was for or how to use it, no-one I knew personally was using it, and I don't have the free time to casually learn an entire new paradigm to do... whatever it was you did with Wave.

Google wave is not really that complex, first thing to do before using it is to watch the video demo (I'm almost sure very few peoples did it), it's a collaboration and productivity tool, so you just can't invite your friends to use it at this stage, you can invite your colleagues and employess, but it's not a product targeting any casual Joe friend, but google seems to expect peoples to adopt it as such. You probably won't ask your friends to use a task management tool to keep in touch with you or what you do. I'm glad it may stick around for sometime,I hope forever, too bad, they will no more work on it.

I think that's actually fair. Until I got 6 or 7 people using it regularly with me it was kind of a head scratcher.

Would you care more or less if Wave was made by a startup instead of a massive existing company like Google?

New products fail all the time. When the company making the product fails to even explain what the product does and just heaps buzzwords together I don't feel any sense of loss when the product goes away. This wouldn't even be newsworthy if it wasn't Google behind it.