Commodore Amiga? It took several years for the PC world to have a similar capable standard machine?
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
441–450 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#442Firewire, Had Apple not insisted on the Royalty may be we could have a world with better I/O. Instead everyone jumped ( back ) to USB and USB 2.0
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#443Grooveshark - one of the first/greatest music streaming services around.
Comprehensive music catalogue, servers never went down, and UI was simplicity incarnate.
Totally illegal business model, so it's not surprising that it didn't survive.
But it was awesome while it lasted.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#444StumbleUpon.com - It proposed links and webpages to read, and as you liked/disliked them it used to learn what you like in order to propose other, better-fitting stuff. Apparently it now has "joined" mix.com, where you can only join via Facebook, twitter or google authentication. Thanks but no thanks.
I came in here to say this. Ctrl+f "StumbleUpon".
Probably one of my favorite ideas. Was sad to see it go.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#445Firewire, Had Apple not insisted on the Royalty may be we could have a world with better I/O. Instead everyone jumped ( back ) to USB and USB 2.0
Yeah... I agree. It took 20 years for the FireWire to be widespread enough for companies started to make products for them (Thunderbolt 3).
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#446Android 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.
Blackberry still makes Android phones with keyboards.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#447Google wave, definitely. I still haven’t found an alternative that suits me.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#448Excluding some of the mentioned ones like Google Reader, ICQ, Winamp etc. All them were at one point in time Champion in their own respective domain. They succeed at the time, so I don't see how it is a failure. They could just be more accurately described as killed or failed to move forward and compete.
So far
Google Wave, Pepple Smart Watch, XMPP, Unity, WebOS, Zune, Windows Phone.
I don't see any of these as "great" at all. And they aren't better in any sense. Google Wave might have succeeded if it was aiming at business use case, but for average consumers I doubt anyone are interested, and that is why it was shutted down.
I have yet to see a single consumer who looked at the UX of Zune, Windows Phone, Unity and thought I wish my Android / iPhone has that.
It is the same thing again and again, Engineers, or Nerds are designing what they thought was good, trying to solve problems where consumers don't have or don't care. There are many case of SaaS successes because their market are filled with the people having the same problem in business or Engineering.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#449JavaFX Silverlight Adobe AIR
This has to be a joke, right? I’m not informed enough to know, but it seems like I’ve only heard negative stuff about these.
Not kidding. I evaluated the capabilities of these platforms and there were some differences but all were better than existing solutions then and now. Flutter on the desktop might be a contender. Can't think of any others.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I tried the charge3 and the step and stairs-climbed counters both read wildly incorrectly. It also had a tendency to track steps taken when driving. They also hadn't got the pulse-ox sensor doing anything at the time I returned it.
The OS on it is quite nice, the iOS app isn't bad either, but the inaccuracy just drove me nuts.
I moved on to a Garmin vivosmart instead. Not quite as pretty, but a lot more accurate.