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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?

#491

Post by joshuahornby »

face_mcgace wrote: post #481
golergka wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it would take to built a similar product now? Ten years later, the tooling and ecosystem for such complicated SPAs is much better, so it should be at least a little bit less of an effort, right?

Yea I would have assumed so - tbh this is still a massive problem I face in each new org I join. Documents/communications are scattered across google docs, notion, slack, jira.

Doesn't Notion try and solve this problem? What do you think Notion could do better to solve this issue?

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

#492

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

viraptor wrote: post #484
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…

It wasn't only marketing. Either the codebase was bad or the browsers at the time were not powerful enough for it. I remember using it for a uni project and after a few messages got into the history, it kept getting slower and slower. At some point it took seconds of lag between the key presses and the result. As great as wave was, it didn't work very well either.

If it was written in Angular, that sounds about right.

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

#494

Post by Terretta »

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…

Google Wave was late to the Groove party — that also failed:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks

Ray Ozzie’s Groove was remarkable for distributed teams in the mid-2000s; I’d argue not yet replicated.

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

#495

Post by randiantech »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #492
viraptor wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't only marketing. Either the codebase was bad or the browsers at the time were not powerful enough for it. I remember using it for a uni project and after a few messages got into the history, it kept getting slower and slower. At some point it took seconds of lag between the key presses and the result. As great as wave was, it didn't work very well either.

If it was written in Angular, that sounds about right.

If im not wrong it was developed using GWT.

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

#496

Post by tgtweak »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #94

Chevy Volt. I wouldn't necessarily say it wasn't successful, but GM is killing it, and to me the irony is that I think it is a much better option for 90% of people than an all-electric vehicle. Yes, all-electric is the future, but right now being able to be on battery 95% of the time, but never having range anxiety because I can always get gas when needed, is wonderful. I can go on long trips and never worry about ha…

Kind of frustrating that GM killed the Cadillac version (ELR), citing poor sales and lack of a market for luxury hybrid/electric. I think the current number if luxury electric cars coming into the market disagrees. I'd be all over a volt if it had the slightest lean towards luxury or sport. The bolt is godforsaken ugly despite it's great numbers.

At $160/kWh for lithium batteries, it seems you could put a simple Atkinson cycle gas generator in the car for less than the extra 40kwh of batteries and yield better range and flexibility.

They also killed the CT6 plug-in hybrid after 1 year.

Seems they have too much brand debt to even bother putting out decent cars since nobody will bother trusting it.

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

#497

Post by jamesrcole »

oneowl wrote: post #191

PS vita. Powerful handheld. Dual analog sticks. Great hardware. Lots of good games but it could never compete with the smart phones. 3DS didn't do too well either as compared to DS. I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon. I'm sad because I don't really enjoy playing games on my mobile phone.

> 3DS didn't do too well either as compared to DS.

It sold about half as many, but it still did very well. It's the 11th best selling video game system of all time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...

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

#498

Post by m-p-3 »

gtf21 wrote: 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 think their reliance on selling a device and not services as their source of income made them great, but also made them vulnerable.

If they sold additional services that weren't necessary for the watch to perfom, then maybe they'd have survived without depending on Kickstarter for funding.

I'm sad they're gone. There is nothing quite like it on the market.

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

#500

Post by arendtio »

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 think, one of the biggest mistakes was that it wasn't backward compatible with email. Currently, there is an opportunity to fix was has gone wrong back then with Chat Over IMAP (COI). Maybe OX the driving company behind COI will realize what kind of an opportunity they have to extend COI from a simple chat extension to a full-featured email 2.0
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