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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?

#641

Post by piccolbo »

jonas21 wrote: post #89
mephitix wrote: post #24

Google Inbox. And I don’t “find my favorite Inbox features in Gmail”. If you can’t tell I’m still bitter about it :(

Just curious, which features are you bitter about? I was a long-time Inbox user and was dreading the day I'd have to switch back to Gmail. But now that I've done it, I've found that I don't really miss Inbox at all.

Besides bundles, the duplication of categories and labels hurts. Labels are second class (can't have a tab for instance) and categories are not user-generated. Lack of abstraction and orthogonality, a.k.a. "tacked on"

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

#642

Post by piccolbo »

mephitix wrote: post #355
jonas21 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, which features are you bitter about? I was a long-time Inbox user and was dreading the day I'd have to switch back to Gmail. But now that I've done it, I've found that I don't really miss Inbox at all.

Trip bundles, pinning, mail previews. Inbox was much cleaner than Gmail. Gmail also feels slower than Inbox - spinners on startup. And other UX issues: seeing previews of images right in the email list, font/UI makes it harder to find things vs Inbox. Inbox was a much nicer UI/UX. Ads are annoying but I would have been fine with ads if it was integrated in Inbox. And look, I understand that it doesn’t make sense to i…

Can you explain why it doesn't make sense to invest in two email clients? Particularly if you make one of the two premium?

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

#643

Post by msingle »

jawns wrote: post #92
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 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.

http://rebble.io/ seems relevant for you and other like-minded persons.

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

#644

Post by piccolbo »

Yetanfou wrote: post #54

The promise of a decentralised internet where the distinction between producer and consumer is entirely up to the person at the keyboard.

Other decentralized techs had promise but were later re-centralized (FM radio is the first example that comes to mind). It seems to me techies think that the natural tendency to monopolies in the capitalistic economy can be countered by distributed protocols, and I think the evidence is against that. FM radio -> clear channel. TCP/IP -> NAT. SMTP/IMAP -> gmail, outlook, yahoo. http -> web giants. XMPP -> Facebook messenger. The idea that monopolies are obsolete by the time they form is preposterous. Recommended reading: "The curse of bigness" Tim Wu.

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

#645

Post by sh87 »

piccolbo wrote: post #642
mephitix wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trip bundles, pinning, mail previews. Inbox was much cleaner than Gmail. Gmail also feels slower than Inbox - spinners on startup. And other UX issues: seeing previews of images right in the email list, font/UI makes it harder to find things vs Inbox. Inbox was a much nicer UI/UX. Ads are annoying but I would have been fine with ads if it was integrated in Inbox. And look, I understand that it doesn’t make sense to i…

Can you explain why it doesn't make sense to invest in two email clients? Particularly if you make one of the two premium?

Internal politics (Inbox was a clear threat to Gmail UI) and product adoption cannibalism

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

#646

Post by benki »

yitchelle wrote: post #602

Nokia 3310, the first version. It was the most reliable, solid mobile phone I have ever had. Battery life is really long, talk quality is very good, screen does not crack when you drop it.

I understand the sentiment, but the Nokia 3310 was a giant success. Over 100 million units sold.

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

#647

Post by johnxie »

aasasd wrote: post #550
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?

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

Rizzoma looks interesting, thanks for sharing.

We are building a collaborative productivity tool at Taskade (https://taskade.com), in part inspired by Google Wave. Would love to get your thoughts!

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

#648

Post by johnxie »

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?

We've drawn inspirations from Google Wave with Taskade (https://taskade.com), would love to get your thoughts! You can reach me at john@taskade.com
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