The Commodore Amiga.
Excuse me while I go reminisce....
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
421–430 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still wear my Pebble every day and am not looking forward to the day when it conks out. The thing that blows me away is no one has really swooped in to replace it. I got a Pebble because I wanted an always-on screen with high battery life (I charge mine roughly once every 5 days), and I have no idea where I'm going to find one when the time comes.
I'm still getting by with my Pebble Time Steel, and I've been watching (no pun intended) Fitbit's releases to see if they're yet up to snuff. It looks like the most recent revision of their smartwatches would work OK for me (and add HR sensor). Don't know if they'll be sufficiently reliable, since this has been a weak spot for Fitbit in years past. If I'm able to eke out another 2-3 years, I might get an Apple Watch,…
I have a Fitbit charge3 and I really like it. I have only had it for 6 months, so I can’t speak to it’s reliability.
The only thing I wish it had was an alarm that would wake me up at a specific level of sleep, like rem sleep.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#423Nokia N9 and its OS: Meego. Imho this was in so many aspects "UX just done right".
Killed by the Symbian feud within Nokia and being considered "a toy" by other higher ups, hence the Maemo/Meego rewrite instead of focus and shipping
(I might say one of the issues with lack of focus was relying too much on desktop linux components, as Android went down a different path, but that's a discussion for another time)
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#424www.airwavemini.com
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#425Android touchscreen phones with physical slide-out qwerty (though I would have preferred Colemak ;)) keyboards like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro. So much quicker and more comfortable to touch-type on (ironic, no? :)), I barely ever made any typos.
I had a Samsung Galaxy Chat. Miss that thing, it was awesome.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#426Google 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.
Actually, I am working an RSS reader app with built-in discussions and Google Reader was a great inspiration for me. I still use RSS readers as a primary way of aggregating content. Leave your email if it'd like to be notified once I have a beta version: https://forms.gle/Xp47FqQXKwcJakSW8
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#427Google 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.
> I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular
Nobody could make it popular after that infamous shower photo. Products need certain coolness to gain traction and Scoble made it go the other way (I live in non-English speaking country and I use that shot to explain the word "nerd").
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#428Google 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.
Basic problem with Google Glass:
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#429Firefox OS was revolutionary as an idea, but the timing was not there. If it came out a few years after, who knows what could have been. :(
Check out https://www.kaiostech.com/ , it's a fork of Firefox OS for feature phones.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#430Google 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'll be the contrarian here. I tried wave and was never really thrilled with it. Maybe I would have grown to like it, but I never really saw its place in my workflows. IMHO it didn't do any one thing great. It also didn't really play nice with other applications. It was more of an all-or-nothing experience.
I think if it really was so great others would have copied it and made great clones. Given that that never happened it would seem that others were never motivated enough to build a clone, which tells me that it was never useful enough.
I would be happy to be proven wrong about what a great tool it was, but in the end it seemed like more of a cool tech-demo than anything great.