Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 648 posts

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

#271

Post by icelancer »

taneq wrote: post #71
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'…

> my personal view is that they tried to become too big, and I don't think the wearables market is really that valuable I think you're spot on here. They had a perfectly viable 20-30 person company going in a nice stable little niche, and then the smartwatch hype cycle reached its peak and VCs threw a ton of cash at them along with a mandate to become the Next Big Thing. And so they hired way too many new people, chu…

Everything needing to become a unicorn today is killing a ton of good products and services. It's apparently impossible to just be a successful small business for a few decades in the tech industry.

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

#272

Post by Canada »

ksaj wrote: post #4

The 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!

What was the advantage of these over doing the same with Linux and PC hardware? The Sun Ray looked slick but like everything Sun made was ridiculously overpriced and slower than commodity PC gear.

I don't see the advantage of thin clients over network booted thick clients anyway. It's way more performant and more economical to execute client software on the client CPU.

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

#273

Post by alexis_fr »

valleyjo wrote: post #8

Rdio. Music Streaming service. Not sure what happened after they closed up shop but the UI was beautiful and they had great performance.

Whyd, an audio platform for unfindable records.

Closed and recovered as OSS by the former dev of the company as « OpenWhyd », and still accessible for free on a server, but he’s getting tired.

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

#274

Post by taurath »

lukifer wrote: post #235
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #94

Chevy Volt. I wouldn't necessarily say it wasn't successful, but GM is killing it, and to me the irony is that I think it is a much better option for 90% of people than an all-electric vehicle. Yes, all-electric is the future, but right now being able to be on battery 95% of the time, but never having range anxiety because I can always get gas when needed, is wonderful. I can go on long trips and never worry about ha…

Love my ‘11 Volt, averages 62mpg, including several road trips. Super smooth to drive and nearly zero maintenance; I’ll never go back to a combustion drive train or gears if I can help it.

Idk that puts it too close to Prius territory for me. I’d expect the mileage to be a lot higher!

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

#275

Post by icelancer »

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.

Random people hate being watched, or at least they hate knowing they are being watched by another person.

That being said, like someone else mentioned, Glass and AR-type products are very successful as productivity boosters in people who assemble products. We use Pupil Labs' glasses at our business to do gaze tracking. There's a lot of good use cases for this technology, but it's not cheap and it's pretty specific at this time.

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

#276

Post by taurath »

geddy wrote: post #212
MegaButts wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It could absolutely get smaller in the next gen - I think to keep it cheap, relatively powerful and have acceptable battery life is the main reasons it’s as large as it is.

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

#277

Post by icelancer »

orionblastar wrote: post #265
protomyth wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atari ST was crushing Amiga for years until Commodore got their stuff together and bifurcated the product line into the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500 while also getting good games on the system - plus the Video Toaster and other accessories to finally take advantage of the multimedia superiority of the platform.

It didn't really matter in either case since IBM and its clones were destroying both of them with Macintosh stealing the non-IBM market share all the same.

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

#278

Post by pmiller2 »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #253
k_sze wrote: post #251

BeOS, a modern operating system that supported SMP, preemptive multitasking, and a journaling file system waaaaay before Windows 95 was even released.

BeOS was indeed great, but its first version was released a few months after Win95.

So what? Windows 95 was terrible. It was just prettier than what came before it, and had a pre-existing library of software that would work with it (i.e. every MSDOS app).

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

#279

Post by SquareWheel »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #264
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.

The parent may mean that the design was responsive in the sense that its layout was dynamic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design

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

#280

Post by taurath »

sfRattan wrote: post #185

Aereo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo The Supreme Court decision that killed the company is an excellent example of what happens when jurists don't understand technology... And don't want to, either.

To me it doesn’t even pass the smell test - you can’t rebroadcast content you don’t own, else there’s no point for the content makers to make it. There’s some interesting legal points but to me as a layperson it’s like watching a cammed movie.
Post reply on HN