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

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

#511

Post by luord » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

HHalvi wrote: post #317

I miss not having a new Nexus every year given that Pixel lineup has neither lived up to be a worthy contender for the iPhone nor has it managed to appeal to the Nexus audience. Second to that is probably the void that Sunrise, Carousel and Rdio have left out. I still haven't worthy replacements to all of them.

Agreed, the best phone I ever owned was the Nexus 5.

Currently I have a pixel 3, and technically there isn't much of a difference, meaning that its far larger price tag hangs heavily on it.

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

#512

Post by azhenley » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #488

r3bl wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolex is a terrible example. On top of their products aiming to last generations (nobody's going to leave Apple Watch to their grandchildren), they're also well known for not reporting any sales figures what so ever. Nobody can tell you how many Rolexes there are in total, let alone the sales figures of a specific model of a Rolex. That's partially what makes them so valuable. People usually don't change Rolexes ever…

Changing an Apple Watch/Android Wearable even once every 3-5 years must be the 7th circle of hell for someone like Dieter Rams. It's incredible how normal it has become to switch out $500-$1200 products at such a cycle. Wasteful, next to no functional gain (certified electro-cardiography being exempt in my books), supporting narcissism... It's consumerism to the max. We should all take a step back and think about wha…

I too hate the cycle of replacing expensive things every few years for little to no gain.

But in the case of the Apple Watch, I think this replacement cycle is the same as most jewelry/fashion items.

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

#513

Post by derekp7 » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #490

franee wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup unity was what spelled the end for the Ubuntu wave. I think this has been the single biggest mistake they made. I think it will take at least a decade again to bring the linux desktop to the masses. Gnome 2 was perfect for people coming from windows moving over. Gnome 3 is like windows vista. Me personally, I was really disappointed (of course you can install gnome 2 etc). But at the end of the day you just want…

> bring the linux desktop to the masses I am dumbfounded that people still see this happening at some point.

I saw a quote somewhere from Linus Torvalds that Chrome OS may end up being the future Linux desktop, once they finish polishing off their Linux app integration (Project Crostini). I'm able to actually get most of my work done now in that environment.

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

#514

Post by bane » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

BeOS

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

#515

Post by dswalter » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #275

apexkid wrote: post #243

Google 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.

Random people hate being watched, or at least they hate knowing they are being watched by another person. That being said, like someone else mentioned, Glass and AR-type products are very successful as productivity boosters in people who assemble products. We use Pupil Labs' glasses at our business to do gaze tracking. There's a lot of good use cases for this technology, but it's not cheap and it's pretty specific at…

It's not entirely clear what you're saying here. Does your business use these solutions as a way to enrich the information needed used by someone assembling your products, or do you use them to ensure everyone's eyes are looking in the correct direction while on the assembly line?

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

#516

Post by ncmncm » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

watersb wrote: post #304

ncmncm wrote: post #162

Apple A/UX IMHO the final Apple product released before they turned intolerably smug.

Apple A/UX always felt unfinished to me. Great leveraging the partnership with IBM, but IIRC some Mac apps would fail to run in some weird ways. I played with it as a sysadmin at work, on a Mac IIfx with thousands of dollars of RAM installed. Did you ever get to play with the Apple Network Server? A rebadged IBM/6000 box. Apple's approach to distributed network services was really great... Alas. This era was like the…

I had it on an SE/30: 16 MHz 68030, maxed out at 8MB of RAM, 1M per stick. (Later you could get bigger sticks; I never did.) It had floating point hardware 5x as fast as the IBM PC-AT's coprocessor. The whole machine with 80M disk was $2400, in 1990 dollars. It had one slot, taken by the 10Mb/s ethernet card, and a 512x342 monochrome 1-bit-deep display.

It ran MacOS7's GUI, and it was as responsive as anything you run today.

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

#517

Post by TaylorGood » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #347

TaylorGood wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the founders is a neighbor.. $20m later. They lucked out with FB/Zuck frothing over their company so early.

I wouldn’t call it luck. Sure, the money is good, but their company is now essentially dead and should never be trusted to do anything good (just like every single thing Facebook does ends up having nefarious goals behind it).

Luck only in the sense of how early they were as a company and the premium Facebook put on them.

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

#518

Post by buzzerbetrayed » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

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.

Wave predates angular, but good attempt at a dig?

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

#519

Post by Eric_WVGG » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #392

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 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...

Apple Watch revenue has surpassed the iPod, which was an absolute phenomenon. http://www.asymco.com/2017/11/08/when-watch-surpassed-ipod/

The cultural impact is undoubtedly lower.

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

#520

Post by TallGuyShort » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #430

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'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 happ…

I think Slack gets close to some of my favorite bits: the ability to go back and edit messages, spawn threads that go off on a tangent, the way it can link nicely to referenced docs and JIRAs, etc. I have mixed feelings about real-time typing. But it feels like Slack's generation of chat tools have picked up some of the ideas Wave pioneered without being all-or-nothing or not being primarily a chat tools.