Drop.io. Got bought by Facebook I think and was unceremoniously shuttered.
Last.fm, well. I really miss it.
Windows Phone and especially the Metro Design (although some of it carried into Modern UI).
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
41–50 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#42Notion Ink Adam Tablet [1] Pixel Qi Display [2]
Altogether not a truly great tablet, but I loved the idea of the Pixel Qi display. Normal colored LCD when being used indoors with backlight enabled. But outdoors in the bright sun, the colors faded away and it became some e-paper like reflective display. That way you could use it for watching movies in the dark and reading books on the beach ;-)
Sadly the tablet had a lot of other flaws and the colors of the LCD weren't as good as the AMOLEDs we are used to today, but every time I see one of those ebook readers with b/w display I wonder why the Pixel Qi displays didn't make it.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#43Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#44Sega Dreamcast. All Sony had to say was "PS2 is coming next year" and everyone stopped listening to what they could get today .
Even if they hadn’t, the PS2 is one of the greatest consoles of all time. It would have been a difficult competitor to go against.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#45Google Reader Google Wave
Losing reader essentially killed RSS feeds for me. I tried importing my lists into other apps but it became a hassle
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#46Canonical Bazaar
Microsoft Encarta
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
WPF definitely falls in the didn't succeed category. Microsoft grossly mismanaged everything around WPF and C# during the Sinofsky era. It's doing much better on the C# side today but the UI developer community left WPF long ago and will never return.
WPF is still pretty much the standard on Windows but it definitely could be much better. They just abandoned it and then went on these weird detours with Silverlight, WinRT and now UWP.
I suspect the actual standard on Windows today, as hated as it is here on HN, is now Electron.
The HTML based UI ecosystem is just so much richer and better supported than WPF that any theoretical advantages WPF might have are dwarfed by the practical considerations of just build it in Electron and be done with it.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#48Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#49OS/2