Google Wallet is actually fairly useless. To load it up you need a credit card. If you have a credit card, you could just as well, uhm, use a credit card.
No support. You NEED to be able to reach a human being to clear up problems with credit cards.
I used google wallet to pay for a google apps yearly account. I also used a different card to pay for a couple games from the android market.
I dutifully checked all the options to make sure that the card I used to pay for those games could never ever be used to pay the renewal fee on the the apps account. Then one day I found that the wrong card had been charged for the apps renewal. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at google. I couldn't find any help online. I couldn't even find a phone number to call.
So I removed the cards from my wallet account. Cancelled the wallet account, and snarl "no" anytime google tries to get a credit card from me.
I cannot talk for everyone, but I use paypal instead of Google Wallet, because it allows me to pay without using credit card.
I do think that current model of credit card payment is broken so I refuse to use it. Sure if dishonest merchant purges all my cash from credit card I could get it back by contacting bank, but money lost would be covered by all bank clients.
I don't have much trust in paypal, but I can transfer to it appropriate amount of money from bank just before the payment, so possible damage is much lower. That said my level of trust with facebook is so low that I would probably refuse to put on their account even 100 USD.
It's not a solved problem. 66% of the world does not have a bank account (much less a credit card).
However, 90% have access to a cell phone.
That was the basis for my failed micropayments project :)
It didn't fail because of a lack of demand, but because it's hard to tackle without significant resources. I still might resurrect a less ambitious version (being a middleman here in Uruguay).
You obviously haven't had the pleasure of using 3D Secure...
I tend to always use Paypal or Google Checkout (sorry... 'Wallet'...) if given the option as I don't have to fish out my card and go through several screens of slow badly implemented web forms. Often I don't even have to enter my address whilst with a credit/debit card option I always do.
the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email.
I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple isn't going as badly as the constant catch-up game Google Plus (and Wave, and whatever they called the other one) plays with Facebook.
but seriously, business failure can happen for so many reasons, it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless of course you see a string of people failing at the same thing.
Woah.
Google Wallet failed because they didn't already have accounts for everyone when they launched it. Paypal was the only competitor but they didn't offer anything paypal didn't already offer, and everyone was already on paypal.
> pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email.
I can see that you're having some difficulty with google recently, but you can't actually believe this. What about Maps? Saying that maps is search because it has search built in means we can call GMail search too. What about Calendar?
> I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple
This is where the snark starts to bother me. Let's acknowledge that Apple made a phone with a big glass touchscreen before Google. What, since then, has been a great innovation that Android has rushed to rip off?
Android half a failure? You must be joking, it's one of their greatest successes. Look around you, for sure you will see at least one person using an android phone.
And what about the ads? They were probably the first company that started making real money with them online.
Google Maps? When I want to find a place I use it, are there any other products that provide a good coverage of almost the whole world (and my little village)?
Wave was scraped a while ago and taken completely offline just recently. I loved the per-character live action, but the rest of the UX was non-revolutionary and mostly a disaster.
Why not "Coca Cola Buy" NFC payment chip in every bottle too to be used in restaurants/bars? My mother knows the brand Coca Cola, and if Coca Cola hires 1000 engineers to provide an NFC chip in every bottle; they may get 1% from global.....
