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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?

#161

Post by bri3d »

jtbayly wrote: post #106
karmakaze wrote: post #56

JavaFX Silverlight Adobe AIR

This has to be a joke, right? I’m not informed enough to know, but it seems like I’ve only heard negative stuff about these.

Conceptually they all offered a way to write managed-language, write-once desktop applications.

React Native and Electron carry the torch of this style of development now and both seem to be gaining traction in a way their predecessors couldn't. I like both, but can't help thinking that a UI framework designed as a UI framework would have served us better than CSS and the DOM in the long run.

Put simply: Silverlight/WPF and C# could have been a much better Electron and TypeScript if the runtime were implemented in a less myopic way.

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

#163

Post by jjakque »

charpede wrote: post #136

Wasn't there a Microsft Surface Table at one point? What ever happened to that? I had always imagined that was going to be the Microsoft-Tron crossover I always wanted.

It was rebranded to PixelSense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense), giving its name to the Surface we know of today.

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

#164

Post by rbritton »

iPod Nano (6th gen) and to a lesser extent, the iPod Shuffle. It’s the best clip-on music player I’ve ever used, and there’s a void now with it being fully discontinued. I’m not a fan of their intended replacement (iPhone + Bluetooth headphones) due to weight and the headphone options available.

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

#165

Post by stewbrew »

drfuchs wrote: post #98

Segway. They managed to keep it secret until the official announcement, and at the time you wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t actually seen it (video of it on network news, that is).

I remember a slightly different story: There were claims they would revolutionize urban traffic. Then they came up with a rather ridiculous solution, especially in consideration of the price point. What's left are tourist tours for people who don't want to walk and who would rather prefer sitting in front of a TV set.

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

#166

Post by tomrod »

joshuamorton wrote: post #130
tomrod wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something folks outside Google can access to get a human being in Google?

Lord no. In what universe would it make sense to let random people spam a channel you're using to coordinate an emergency response.

Intake/ingestion.

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

#169

Post by sytelus »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #5

Parse (although it lives on as open source and other providers, see. https://buddy.com/blog/parse-buddy-forever-free-full-feature... for example) Microsoft's WPF

WPF is horrible architecture. It's most important purpose is a to serve as case study in how not to design software.
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