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Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

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Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#141

Post by doomrobo »

ben-hudson wrote: post #65
gtf21 wrote: post #58

Pebble smart-watches. I had them from the original kickstarter, and eventually had a Pebble Time Round which I loved. Whilst I now would never buy a smartwatch, I think that theirs were by far the best. Slimline, with a great UI, and nice functionality, and also not locked into either mobile ecosystem. I'm not entirely sure what caused their death, but my personal view is that they tried to become too big, and I don'…

Maybe you'd be interested in http://rebble.io/

This is a really sweet idea. A lot of the software looks like it hasn't been updated for over 6 months though.

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#142

Post by colechristensen »

chrisco255 wrote: post #87
colechristensen wrote: post #79

Switch light bulbs. Beautiful design, great natural light color, engineered to dissipate heat very well (and thus last a long time), they got on the cover of Wired. However they overdid the packaging and had a hard times convincing people to buy $60 light bulbs and only sold in strange stores.

Do you mean these: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Light-Bulbs-LED-Bulbs/S... ?

Yes, those are the ones. (out of stock everywhere, company shut down, in case it isn't noticed)

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#143

Post by jjcm »

ryeon wrote: post #61

turntable.fm was super fun! wish they had something like this now.

plug.dj is a close replacement, otherwise I made mashup.fm which downloads a copy of whatever you add to your playlist (in case the source got taken down, something very common with the mashup genre due to copyright fingerprinting working very poorly with mashups). The source for that is here: https://github.com/nthitz/mashupfm

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#144

Post by gloira32 »

mamp wrote: post #140

Path. A private social network with a great UI. We set it up for our extended family and the children could use it without exposure to Facebook etc. Path had nice UI innovations that were later merged into other platforms. I guess people prefer a bigger audience over privacy.

Wait, what? Path was one of the (if not the main) reasons that Apple added the contacts permission in iOS 6, because they sent the whole list to their servers, and then texted people.

https://www.cultofmac.com/144946/path-uploads-and-stores-you...

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#145

Post by protomyth »

rwallace wrote: post #91

The Atari 800. Beautiful design, but initially overbuilt and too expensive for the market; I suspect two different home gaming machines from the same company also confused consumers; later, when a lower-cost version was released, Commodore had already started gobbling up market share.

You might want to actually look at the sales figures for the Atari 800. Atari and Commodore were outselling Apple in their day. Commodore did indeed outsell Atari, but Atari wasn't a failure.

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#148

Post by rocky1138 »

shhehebehdh wrote: post #44
rocky1138 wrote: post #31

Sega 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.

It could have held it's own technologically, except that SEGA were complete dumbshits and their console supported burned CDRs out of the box. That was a coup de grace.

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#149

Post by city41 »

wj wrote: post #137

Google's Nexus 7 might qualify. A really great tablet at an affordable price that got one minor refresh then was cancelled. I see Palm already mentioned. Neo Geo. Obviously everything I have done was great--too advanced for its time to succeed.

Neo Geo as in the game platform from SNK? I’d argue it was very successful, being supported for 14 years. The thing is the arcade version of it was the real product, the home version was more a novelty.

Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

#150

Post by protomyth »

crikli wrote: post #121
darpa_escapee wrote: post #111

Palm/HP Pre. Coming up on a decade since it was released, and it's still the best phone I've ever owned. Too bad about Palm and HP, though.

Agreed, WebOS was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. And I agree about the Pre, I loved that thing.

The Pre (or HP 3) with the Blackberry Passport keyboard would be an amazing thing to have these days.
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