Regarding Google Wave’s similarity to Lotus Notes, which is a meme I’ve heard from several angles — David Jones hits the nail on the head:
Well, I used Notes from 1994 to 1999. It did have a database backend for e-mail and a rich collaborative editing model. But it didn’t have realtime shared editing, or instant annotation.
And it was shit. No-one in their right minds would have wanted the future of the web to have been Notes. Even though, and I completely agree, it did things that the web is now only just getting round to.
+1 to that!