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Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

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361–370 of 648 posts

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

#361

Your 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. Appl…

You may want to re-read the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#362
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know last.fm entirely as a site that you get in search results for song titles and lyrics but forces you to log in. What service does it provide exactly? Was it just a very early streaming site with great seo?

It was a streaming site which also had plugins for various media players to let you track what you listened to. Then you could see tables of what you listened to most, see what your friends listened to, and get recommendations. I think what happend is that last.fm failed to get deals with the recording companies, while Spotify succeeded (somehow?). Nowadays I use Spotify like everyone else, but I feel like last.fm ga…

Yeah, you used to be able to stream on Last.fm, then only in UK, Germany and Japan (iirc), and now it uses a little Spotify widget.

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

#364

Google Wave. At work we use Slack, Email, Google Docs, etc. We’re never quite happy with how things work - what should be email vs Slack, at what point should a a Slack conversation become an email conversation to be visible to more people, when should that turn into a doc for a more formal review process, etc. We’re trialling Notion for some things and it’s good. What should be a Wiki? Whenever we have any of these…

This is the first response I've read that has any legitimacy to it.

They were way too early to market. Supposedly their compensation is or was structured to reward shipping new products/features to an extreme degree. I wonder how things might have turned out if they "shipped" it internally first, and iterated on it a few more times before putting it in the hands of the public.

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

#366

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.

WebOS had so much potential. Unfortunately the performance was never there. There are still devices out there with WebOS powered interfaces, I believe LG borrowed bits and parts of it for pseudo smart TV/Projectors. Even the most recent ones, on hardware that should be more than capable, just don't feel responsive.

OTOH, maybe it wasn't that great. There's a lot of kiosks, car head units, set top boxes, etc out there just running extremely stripped down versions of linux or android, just for webkit. It's extremely popular in embedded circles when it comes time to put a ui on a touch screen. (for commercial products, not hobbyists)

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

#368
post #328

Nokia N9 and its OS: Meego. Imho this was in so many aspects "UX just done right".

Everything worked in harmony on the N9. Even the slightly curved screen worked together with the swipe-based interface. It'd be brilliant on an all-screen phone like an iPhone X (so would its successor Sailfish for that matter). No buttons to emulate.

I wrote a post about the alarm clock[1] a while ago, which I feel is pretty indicative of the thought that went into each feature.

Too bad about the rare bug that never got fixed that could show a received SMS under the wrong contact. Or the bug (which did finally get fixed by the community) where if you received an SMS with emoji in it, it would silently just never show the whole message at all!

[1] http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-...

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

#369
post #257
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this integrated in all modern keyboards? At least Google keyboard does it now!

Swiping input yes, but the implementation of Swype was superior to the others like Swiftkey. I can't really describe, but it was better at capturing the words I swiped and also handled multiple languages better.

Multiple languages with Google Swype is indeed awful.

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

#370
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this integrated in all modern keyboards? At least Google keyboard does it now!

If I use the default keyboard instead of swiftkey on my iphone I can't swipe for words and have to peck at the screen like its 1860. So unless there's a setting I'm missing somewhere, no.

What phone is it, I use gboard (even though my Huawei has a Swype keyboard), Settings > Language & Input > gboard > glide > enable glide input.

But if it's an Android just use settings search?

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