dotCloud and a lot of other PAAS platforms. Its ironic since with Docker + Kubernetes, folks essentially are recreating their own PAAS from scratch, but wouldn't use a prebuilt one...
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
461–470 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#462The Atari 800. Beautiful design, but initially overbuilt and too expensive for the market; I suspect two different home gaming machines from the same company also confused consumers; later, when a lower-cost version was released, Commodore had already started gobbling up market share.
You might want to actually look at the sales figures for the Atari 800. Atari and Commodore were outselling Apple in their day. Commodore did indeed outsell Atari, but Atari wasn't a failure.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#463Google 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…
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#464Steinberger 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…
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#465Excluding 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 "grea…
With respect to Windows phone, I only heard good things about the UX from users. I heard many complaints about the lack of apps though.
iOS does feel like a very dated os these days.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#466Segway. They managed to keep it secret until the official announcement, and at the time you wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t actually seen it (video of it on network news, that is).
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#467XMPP. The entire chat landscape is a damn travesty right now. First Facebook disappeared behind it’s own walls, then google... I really miss the days where I could use one client to chat with all my contacts. I honestly think Im in contact with less people now because everyone dropped support for open protocols.
I'm hoping Matrix (matrix.org) will have more success.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
I own several. I'd trust any gear used by Allan Holdsworth. Not that it will help sound like him! I'm digging the recent explosion of headless guitars, Strandberg et al. I started playing on a Strat-shaped body so anything different throws me off. Even the bridge position on a Les Paul type body spooks me. I guess one of the reasons headless/compact guitars don't go outside of the niche of progressive/fusion circles…
I don't know whether this counts as `cool' or not (David Bowie's Tin Machine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtOjC0NLFw
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#469Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#470Android 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.