WinAmp ICQ
Winamp development may be in limbo today, but I would never call it a failed product. It thrived very well, influenced a lot of future products, and also still lives with many users including me.
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
211–220 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#212PS vita. Powerful handheld. Dual analog sticks. Great hardware. Lots of good games but it could never compete with the smart phones. 3DS didn't do too well either as compared to DS. I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon. I'm sad because I don't really enjoy playing games on my mobile phone.
> I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon. What about the Nintendo Switch?
It’s not a dedicated, it’s a hybrid.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#213Visual Basic Classic (VB6)
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#214RethinkDB
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#215Segway. They managed to keep it secret until the official announcement, and at the time you wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t actually seen it (video of it on network news, that is).
I remember a slightly different story: There were claims they would revolutionize urban traffic. Then they came up with a rather ridiculous solution, especially in consideration of the price point. What's left are tourist tours for people who don't want to walk and who would rather prefer sitting in front of a TV set.
The Segway was predicted to become what the electric scooter has instead.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lord no. In what universe would it make sense to let random people spam a channel you're using to coordinate an emergency response.
Outsiders would be -v devoiced.
Then this doesn't solve GPs problem (being able to communicate with insiders) and leaves the problem of needing to worry about all communication being public. That means people's names, commands, tools, architecture, etc. Which is certainly something I'd be curious about, but there's no good reason to take those risks.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#217The Sun Ray was ahead of its time. After Oracle bought and killed it, "the cloud" kicked up and is exactly what the Sun Rays were built for in the first place. Oops!
From the original NCD X-terminal to the current Citrix-based smart terminals there's definitely something compelling about putting the compute elsewhere and displaying graphics locally. Nvidia have to be very worried about Google's Project Stream because of the cloud model: someone aggregating compute and render resources means net selling less than when each person has their own.
It also means far less opportunity to exfiltrate data. There would be no Snowden if he had a dumb terminal that refused to mount storage USB devices, for example. I'm kinda surprised the intelligence community didn't go all in on dumb displays for that reason alone.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#218minidisc didn't exactly flop but it should have been a lot bigger than it was. Great hardware. If Sony hadn't insisted on their ATRAC and drmed it to hell it would have been much more competitive.
It was a massive success everywhere except the USA. But because the USA defines history, it was a "failure".
Wonderful video about the format: https://youtu.be/kU3BceoMuaA
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#219Prismatic (used to be at https://getprismatic.com) - a topic/interest based newsfeed platform, but backed by an ML/AI system to learn from your reading behavior. I loved the product until it got shutdown one day :-(
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#220Google'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.
I adored my Nexus 7 and really wish Google would do it again. On the other hand it's hard to compete with Apple's A12 that's found in their modern iPad line up. Still, I'd gladly take less performance at half the price to stay in the Google ecosystem. It's why I have a Pixel instead of an iPhone despite their being closer in price; I'm not down for the secondary rent of paying for iTunes subscriptions and splitting photos or data across two platforms.