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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?

#611

Post by trn »

JdeBP wrote: post #597
ggm wrote: post #128

Multics

This would be based upon the myth that Multics failed, yes? * https://multicians.org/myths.html

Multics, while not a 'massive' sales success in retrospect, was certainly not the failure commonly believed and wasn't treated as one in the press of the time - at least not until after the decision was made by Honeywell-Bull to phase out the Multics (and CP-6) products to focus on GCOS.

"Honeywell is having considerable — and surprising — success with the ultra-secure Multics operating system … Besides 3-5 systems within Honeywell, Multics has been installed or committed within Nippon Electric, Rome Air Development Center, USAF Data Services Center, and Ford" was widely reported in the mid-1970's industry press.

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

#612

Post by ohiovr »

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…

Apache Wave can be self hosted on sandstorm at least.

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

#613

Post by notahacker »

teddyh wrote: post #428
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.

Basic problem with Google Glass: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14

I think the combination of the actually-not-that-discreet camcorder and the fact it didn't really have a reputation for being able to do much else interesting at launch was the perfect storm

I'm not really that bothered by people holding phones in a way that might be surreptitiously recording me, because I expect they're actually using them for something else.

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

#614

Post by pavel_lishin »

rwallace wrote: post #474
rocky1138 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could have held it's own technologically, except that SEGA were complete dumbshits and their console supported burned CDRs out of the box. That was a coup de grace.

It may not have helped, but let's not call people complete dumbshits for leaving a loophole in their DRM. That was a mistake that could happen to anyone, and the outcome was decided by then anyway. Now botching the Saturn launch because of political infighting between the Japanese and American branches of the company? If you're going to call them complete dumbshits for anything, that's what I would pick.

Do you have a link where I could read about that?

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

#615

Post by unused0 »

trn wrote: post #611
JdeBP wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be based upon the myth that Multics failed, yes? * https://multicians.org/myths.html

Multics, while not a 'massive' sales success in retrospect, was certainly not the failure commonly believed and wasn't treated as one in the press of the time - at least not until after the decision was made by Honeywell-Bull to phase out the Multics (and CP-6) products to focus on GCOS. "Honeywell is having considerable — and surprising — success with the ultra-secure Multics operating system … Besides 3-5 systems w…

And two systems to the NSA.

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

#616

Post by Lowkeyloki »

zanny wrote: post #556
arendtio wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not try KDE? I am a long-time KDE user and very happy with it. The flexible Plasma desktop might give you what you are missing from unity. There seem to be some tutorials on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kde+unity+like

Theres even a page on the KDE wiki about making Plasma look and act like Unity: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/How_to_create_a_Unity-like_l...

Thank you! I'll give this a try.

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

#617

Post by rwallace »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #614
rwallace wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not have helped, but let's not call people complete dumbshits for leaving a loophole in their DRM. That was a mistake that could happen to anyone, and the outcome was decided by then anyway. Now botching the Saturn launch because of political infighting between the Japanese and American branches of the company? If you're going to call them complete dumbshits for anything, that's what I would pick.

Do you have a link where I could read about that?

https://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-Generat...

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

#619

Post by orkon »

balladeer wrote: post #587
orkon wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I am working an RSS reader app with built-in discussions and Google Reader was a great inspiration for me. I still use RSS readers as a primary way of aggregating content. Leave your email if it'd like to be notified once I have a beta version: https://forms.gle/Xp47FqQXKwcJakSW8

Could you please share a link or few screenshots that could tell about what its UI looks like.

It's not yet ready to be shared in the form of screenshots. It will be a simple layout with the feeds list in a collapsible menu on the left-hand side and the list of posts on the right-hand side. When you navigate to post details, you will see the post content with media content if available. In addition to it, there will be a discussion section for each post. I'd like to have keyboard navigation in the app, and I don't plan to invest time in native apps. Instead, I'd like to utilize PWA features to make the web app easy to use on mobiles too.

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

#620

Post by com2kid »

mkhpalm wrote: post #234
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…

> 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. What part of XMPP is doing that? I think you're talking about a bug in an implementation of XMPP not the protocol itself. Its like saying you go to an address and get the wrong website. Hard to blame an issue like that on HTTP rather than a…

> What part of XMPP is doing that? I think you're talking about a bug in an implementation of XMPP not the protocol itself. Its like saying you go to an address and get the wrong website. Hard to blame an issue like that on HTTP rather than a server or a client that implements it.

XMPP relies on clients having the Carbon Copy plugin installed.

Some clients have it installed, some clients do not.

If I have 3 devices connected to XMPP, which one gets a message sent to me is rather hard to determine. Often times it is the one I have most recently sent a message from, but other times it is not, and I will not get messages delivered to any of my other devices until I physically go home and log out of my desktop.

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