Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by dmix » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #279

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

I've never heard someone refer to a website's "responsive" design as it's "responsiveness". That's almost always in regards to performance.

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

#402

Post by penguin_booze » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #306

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…

I too am disappointed that Wave didn't catch on. My hopes were raised when it move to Apache, but alas, it's retired now: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html.

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

#403

Post by Razengan » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:13 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #397

Razengan wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think the wearables market is really that valuable. Hasn't the Apple Watch been outselling Rolex etc.? https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swi...

The watch market must be pretty small these days considering everyone has the time on their smartphone... The only people I see wearing watches are business people who wear suits to work or work outdoors (people in the military). That's only a small percentage of people with a ~$100 product.

I see people of all kinds with Apple Watches all the time, some of them with the higher-end models. Even prompted a few conversations with strangers about the series, bands and faces.

I'd actually bet that phones will be supplanted by a combination of smartwatch + smartglasses in the future.

If you have ever detachedly watched a crowd of people holding out these slabs in their hands and craning their necks over them, you might agree that it looks rather archaic and is begging to be put out of fashion.

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

#404

Post by austhrow743 » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #370

austhrow743 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's an iphone not android. I was letting the commenter know that it's not integrated in to apples keyboard, at least as far as I can tell.

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

#405

Post by Smithalicious » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #363

I just thought, would Linux's "init" fall under this category with systemd. I am not from Linux background but I've been reading about this recently.

I think systemd is a bad thing but I also don't think pre-systemd init systems were a "good product".

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

#406

Post by macspoofing » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:15 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #218

jccalhoun wrote: post #120

minidisc 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.

It was a massive success everywhere except the USA. But because the USA defines history, it was a "failure". Wonderful video about the format: https://youtu.be/kU3BceoMuaA

Minidiscs were only popular in Japan. They had limited success everywhere else.

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

#407

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:16 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #334

icelancer wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. You see it here a lot, someone will be sneering at a business with $10 million annual turnover and 20 staff and calling it a "lifestyle business", as if owning a double-digit percentage of such a business is not an excellent outcome by any sane standards. Venture capital might be the only way to fund a moonshot-style startup but it seems to be the kiss of death for already-established, already-profitable busi…

Moonshots would be cool if they were actually aiming at the Moon, not just churning out websites only incrementally different from other websites. I do wonder how much this churn contributes to the West not being able to do any actual moonshots.

Smartwatches are not "moonshots". They shouldn't be treated as such. They could be a component of one, though, and society would benefit from components being economically stable, instead of imploding after few years. Pebble was arguably the sanest smartwatch design out there - long battery life, power-efficient screens, hackable[0]. Because they suddenly wanted to get too big too fast, the world today does not have any smartwatch of comparable quality and utility.

--

[0] - not just in terms of writing watch faces; people did try to use them as medical devices[1], and they even had a protocol for attaching custom hardware that didn't go anywhere, but probably would if the company was still around

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5018102/

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

#408

Post by sagebird » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:20 AM UTC

sagebird wrote: post #66

Plan 9

Some comfort can be had in knowing that some of the soul or atheistic moved on into golang. Though I imagine the joy of using golang to pale in comparison to the experience of using an os so orthogonally constricted, as well as creating hybrid programs via file based plumbing. If Plan 9 was the dominant os for the last decade, I think the very feeling of being on a computer would be different— similar to the way that sitting in front of a windows 10 desktop, an iPhone, a RPi, a Mac II or C64 are all so different.

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

#409

Post by ZoomZoomZoom » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:22 AM UTC

didymospl wrote: post #22

last.fm Although it didn't die yet, it certainly doesn't live up to its potential.

As an avid scrobbler I'd say their problem was they couldn't get their focus straight. The real power of the service is the data, the stats of the users. Instead of focusing on hardcore users who try to scrobble everything they listen to, last.fm tried to force the unnecessary streaming as a way to grow user base, at the same time limiting and not developing data analysis, social parts of the service ("neighbours"), closing groups, etc., alienating many along the way.

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

#410

Post by gcb0 » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:25 AM UTC

0-_-0 wrote: post #383

Lowkeyloki wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off. I'll admit it was a hard sell when you boot into a blank page that looks like a word processor. It was sadly ahead of its time and was probably pitched to the wrong audience from the start. Rather than trying to explain why Wave is better than email and chat to the internet at…

> I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off. I wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.

because that would have required a single product person, and Google have none.

Google only have failed engineers turned product manager. they live and die by some random metrics. the gmail PM would never accept anything there that reduced time spent (or some other random, disconnected from reality, success metric) by a second!