Ask HN: What successful products were deemed useless, “meh”, etc. at launch?

Dropbox is the classic example, where a commenter on this very website wrote:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

and then went on to say

> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Today, Dropbox is a public company. Its net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $540M, a 47% increase year-over-year. I think that should count as successful.

Not exactly what you are asking, but the thing that immediately jumped into my mind was: post-it notes. A 3M scientist, trying to improve adhesiveness, came across a property that caused stickiness with poor adhesiveness. Not exactly what he was tasked to invent.

Years passed. Until another 3M scientist, who was struggling with the bookmarks he put in the choir hymnals continuously falling out, thought about his colleague's odd sticky non-adhesive thingamajig. And voila! Post-its were born.

Microsoft Word. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word

> It was not initially popular, since its user interface was different from the leading word processor at the time, WordStar.[20] However, Microsoft steadily improved the product, releasing versions 2.0 through 5.0 over the next six years. ... The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers.[13]