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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?

#261

Post by orionblastar »

The Commodore Amiga, it had the advantage until Macs got color cards with the Mac II series. VGA gave IBM PCs with Sound Cards an advantage.

The Amiga had true multitasking for a 68K Machine and even ran MS-DOS and MacOS with emulators. Problem is they could only get game makers to write software for the Amiga. The business software, video editing, etc came too late. They still make Amiga systems with PowerPC chips now.

AROS is an open source of AmigaOS 3.1: http://aros.sourceforge.net/

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

#262

Post by orionblastar »

rocky1138 wrote: post #148
shhehebehdh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a friend with a Dreamcast he had to mod it to play CDRs as the Dreamcast had a different CD format to hold more info. They had to reduce the CD to fit in a 700M CDR. Most games didn't use the full CD.

Google mod chips some time they had them for the Playstation and XBox to use CDRs.

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

#263

Post by rememberlenny »

apexkid wrote: post #243

Google glass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass A pure ingenious effort to turn humans into cyborg by adding the 4th dimension of computing to their lives in a non intrusive and seamless way. I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular given that wearable tech like watches and fitness band is catching up so quickly.

Google Glass is actively produced and successful in the enterprise space. The consumer market wasn't the ideal demographic, but it pivoted and continued development.

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

#264

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

milkytron wrote: post #181

WebOS. When I used it, I saw it as a blend between Android and iOS. It had the beauty, polish, and responsiveness that I loved on iPhones, but had the developer options and open community that Android had. It was a great product, and it's a shame that now we really only have two choices for smartphone operating system, WebOS being neither.

>responsiveness

No, this one isn't true. Performance was one of the biggest problems of webOS. WebOS user forums were full of posts complaining about that. UI built with HTML and JavaScript rendered by Webkit1 was way too much for 2000s hardware to handle.

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

#265

Post by orionblastar »

protomyth wrote: post #145
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.

Atari ST was another computer that failed. It used a DRI CP/M-68 and GEM with TOS with MS-DOS formatted disks. The Amiga outsold it, but the ST had the Magic Sac to run Mac programs as well.

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

#269

Post by artworx »

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'…

I use my Pebble Time Steel every day and will continue to use it until it dies. I tried a few different smartwatches and, for me, nothing comes close to the battery life, always-on display and hardware buttons combo.

For my purposes, it is a productivity boost to have calendar, slack etc. notifications and be able to mute everything by holding a button.

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