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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?

#541

Post by the_trapper »

Quenty wrote: post #300
jawns wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

Garmin watches have a week battery life and an always on display!

I second this. Garmin's wearables are excellent. My Instinct gets almost 2 weeks if battery life with approximately 30 minutes of GPS run tracking 5 days a week.

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

#542

Post by typenil »

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.

I've found the Pixel 2 to be far more stable and less laggy than either of my Nexus 5x's. (Went through 2 because the bootloop bug bricked the first.)

Not that I think Google's hardware is doing a bang up job. Pixel buds are the worst headphones I've ever owned.

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

#543

Post by typenil »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #505
Freeboots wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Nexus 5 phone. Lightweight, durable plastic body, good hardware, not ridiculously large... I still havent seen a spiritual successor

We had 3 different Nexus 5X phones die via a bootloop. All bought from different vendors. 100% death rate. And yes, I know there was a "fix" released last year. Didn't work for any of them. Great cheap phones other than that. Really good cameras on them.

I went through 2 Nexus 5x's. Even when they weren't being bricked, they were laggy as hell. I'd constantly be waiting 5 seconds for actions to register.

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

#544

Post by zanny »

arendtio wrote: post #349
com2kid wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xmpp is a disaster, I have otp enabled and all too often messages are delivered to the wrong machine, but encrypted with a different key, so it is pure garbage and lost forever. That is on the off chance that the message is actually delivered. Trying to get omemo up and running, but some clients (pidgin) have next to no support for it, while others only support it, and it seems it is only supported on ejabberd as of…

While I agree with your pain points, I would not say XMPP that the protocol isn't any good. - Pidgin: Just take a look at their bug tracker. You will not have any problems finding tickets requesting essential features which are 6 years and older (e.g. Message Archive Management). So unless the Pidgin devs get some done I would not use their client (Gajim is a much better alternative, especially since the 1.0 release…

A large part about why there is a low availability of XMPP clients and why clients like Pidgin don't implement features for years is because of how verbose and, as OP said, much of a disaster it is.

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

#545

Post by massysett »

Eyes wrote: post #6

Swype. It disappeared from my phone this week and I'm in shambles.

That’s too bad, years ago I switched from Android to iPhone and the only thing I missed was Swype. I still miss it. Later Swype became available on iOS but it was never as good as the Android one.

If it’s gone that’s one less reason to switch back to Android.

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

#546

Post by adapt_and_laugh »

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.

Have you seen Focals? They seem to be a spiritual successor to glass, though focused more on the form factor (looking like a normal pair of glasses) than matching all the features glass had (as part of the Google ecosystem). North only has a few stores so not many people have actually tried them out.

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

#547

Post by Nextgrid »

TaylorGood wrote: post #517
Nextgrid wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still wouldn’t call it luck. Their company and product is now dead, and any good use they envisioned for the product is now forgotten in favour of nasty and user-hostile use-cases.

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

#549

Post by jaclaz »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #253
k_sze wrote: post #251

BeOS, a modern operating system that supported SMP, preemptive multitasking, and a journaling file system waaaaay before Windows 95 was even released.

BeOS was indeed great, but its first version was released a few months after Win95.

Well, AFAICR at the time (on the same hardware) BeOS ran circles around any Windows OS, including Windows 98 (and besides both NT 4.00 and 2000), particularly with graphics and web/browser.

And (again on same hardware) it was if not faster, much more pleasant to the eye than most Linux distros.

Surely it needed less memory and processor power than the competitors or however felt on limited resources very "snappy".

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

#550

Post by aasasd »

golergka wrote: post #463
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…

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?

Afaik several projects replicated what Wave did, since IIRC it was open-sourced. E.g. Rizzoma. Nothing came of them apparently.
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