Google Reader. I still think RSS was a better way of aggregating news than many alternatives of today, all wrapped up in a solid and practical interface.
Google Reader was a success in that it dominated its niche for many years.
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
351–360 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#352minidisc 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.
I agree with you. I was a huge fan of Minidisc, and even had an MD-related business in the early 2000s. However, as others have said, it was really only (relatively) unsuccessful in the US. It was hugely successful in Japan, and only faded out as the iPod made it obsolete for music listening, and (slightly later) flash recorders took over the market for field recording. In Japan, you can still buy blank minidiscs in…
I had an MD player when the first iPod came out. A friend got one and I noticed how bad it sounded. So we compared the same track at the same bitrate with the same headphones. The quality on the iPod was much worse. But it did look cool and they had iTunes.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#353WebOS. 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.
I always felt that for a product called webOS, Palm had one of the worst mobile browsers. The big missing feature I remember was lack of support for downloadable fonts. I don't remember the Touchpad itself being particularly polished (although the corded charger itself is supposed to be very high quality). Some of the touch stuff was pretty slick (the rubber band effect in particular), but a lot of it was pretty infuriating for me to use.
The mobile OS I miss is the most is the last iteration of BlackBerry. Although Palm had the upper hand in developer/user relations, I think that BlackBerry really got the UX right.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#354Pebble 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/
I like how their website logo shows the actual time.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#355Google Inbox. And I don’t “find my favorite Inbox features in Gmail”. If you can’t tell I’m still bitter about it :(
Just curious, which features are you bitter about? I was a long-time Inbox user and was dreading the day I'd have to switch back to Gmail. But now that I've done it, I've found that I don't really miss Inbox at all.
Trip bundles, pinning, mail previews. Inbox was much cleaner than Gmail. Gmail also feels slower than Inbox - spinners on startup.
And other UX issues: seeing previews of images right in the email list, font/UI makes it harder to find things vs Inbox. Inbox was a much nicer UI/UX.
Ads are annoying but I would have been fine with ads if it was integrated in Inbox.
And look, I understand that it doesn’t make sense to invest in/maintain two heavily used email clients. But the most infuriating thing is the trip bundles. That was my most used feature and such a distinguishing aspect of Inbox that it’s almost insulting that Google would tell me I can “find my favorite features in Gmail” when it’s blatantly not there.
I would pay to still use Inbox.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#356Visual Basic 6
+ Fist bump. One day I will have something as good as VB6's IDE. Right?
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#357Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#358Your thoughts are wrong, plain and simple. Delusional at best. It was so far from a great product that I'd like a list of other things you think are good so that I can avoid them.
This is a very personal device segment, and privacy/security should come before everything else. I couldn't imagine being naive enough to think some nonamers could achieve this, or that android is even worth mentioning in this context. Apple's the only one to actually ship a compelling and useful product in any capacity past mere novelty.
Pebble was a dogshit piece of hardware with an absolutely dogshit API. It was far from slimline, nearly unreadable in most real world conditions (try reading an exit number off your wrist while you're on a motorcycle, I'll wait), slow as hell, and wildly insecure. They were also extremely fragile (they are incapable of surviving a common skateboard fall, let alone a brush with a brick wall while walking). Nothing screams quality like soft rubber buttons most commonly found on happy meal toys and TV remotes and a screen reminescient of a tamagatchi. I used those survival scenarios because they are all things my fruit watch has shrugged off without so much as a scratch! Actually took a chunk out of the corner of the brick wall when I accidentally swung my wrist into it :X
Pull the wool from over your eyes and look back into all the promises they made, and then walked back from. Do you remember when they told us it'd have sapphire crystal faces? Or injection molded ceramic bodies? The myriad list of features that silently fell by the wayside. They're a textbook example of how to fleece idiots on kickstarter. By the way, part of their problem wasn't that they tried to get too big, it was that they preferred large numbers of cheap hires. They weren't being hired for their talent, they were being mined for their social capital. This is an extremely common tactic found in other industries such as the loan/mortgage refinancing industry. Hire graduates > harvest referrals from friends and family who think they're helping this person look good at work > gone 18 months later with nothing to show for it.
Before you write me off as a hater, know that I was one of the very first backers on kickstarter and was so utterly disappointed that they had missed the mark to such an extent that I threw it in a macerating toilet and flushed it, then tweeted the video to the CEO. It's so much more than hate. It's vehement disgust. I just spit on the ground
The 1st gen apple watch by itself is leaps and bounds more useful. I specifically mention the 1st gen watch because of the way it works with the phone (similar to how og pebble functioned, only, not pants on head worthless), and also because it's still the thinnest amongst their roster. If you never used it for anything else other than haptic feedback to know wether you will have to turn left or right while driving, and heart rate/steps, it would still be leagues above anything Pebble ever managed to ship.
Good rittance.
I'm not interested in anything you have to say in response to this. I just want everyone else to know that pebble was so far removed from anything resembling "great", let alone "good" or even "merely ok"