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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?

#371

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.

Dieter Bohn is that you?

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

#372
post #32
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WPF definitely falls in the didn't succeed category. Microsoft grossly mismanaged everything around WPF and C# during the Sinofsky era. It's doing much better on the C# side today but the UI developer community left WPF long ago and will never return.

WPF is still pretty much the standard on Windows but it definitely could be much better. They just abandoned it and then went on these weird detours with Silverlight, WinRT and now UWP.

WPF evolved into XAML. WPF is considered stable and feature complete.

Now they are working on cross-platform and that's why it had a feature freeze ( + because of graphics). It's now being added in .net core though.

So it's not dead at all

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

#375

Wasn't there a Microsft Surface Table at one point? What ever happened to that? I had always imagined that was going to be the Microsoft-Tron crossover I always wanted.

We had one. It wasn't "great" the touch screen had too much latency. I think it was around $8K.

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

#376

Steinberger guitars. They were brilliant to play, they were incredibly lightweight, they were near-indestructible, they could stay in tune for weeks, but they were just too weird to be anything more than a fad. It didn't help that Ned Steinberger had questionable business skills, they never really got manufacturing costs under control, but the basic design was utterly brilliant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinber…

Strandberg guitars are similar in concept, maybe you'll find them interesting

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony tried to do the same in 2005 when Microsoft released the XBox 360, only they kept pushing back the release date. Thankfully their E3 2006 press conference was such a flop that in a bit of karmic justice it forced them to stop resting on their laurels and compete for marketshare again.

There was precedent. Sony destroyed the SEGA Saturn's USA launch by simply walking up to the microphone at E3 in 1995 by saying just one word: $299.

Saturn's launch was destroyed by a sudden release with too few retailers onboard. E3 was just a byproduct of that.

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

#378
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 had a Kickstarter Edition pebble. It was terrible, both in hardware and software. After a few months it developed an issue when the contents of the display disappeared, and I had to physically press the display to see something (googling this it seemed I wasn't the only one with this problem). It also supported running only 1 watch app at a time, which meant if I had a timer running and I got an SMS which took focus, the timer stopped. I would have thought that running a timer on a watch would be basic functionality...

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

#380

I really thought Thalmic Labs Myo was going to give us the Minority Report-esque future we deserved: https://www.zdnet.com/article/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-myo-ge...

I believe CTRL-Labs took over that goal and is actively pursuing it: https://www.ctrl-labs.com/
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