Google Inbox. And I don’t “find my favorite Inbox features in Gmail”. If you can’t tell I’m still bitter about it :(
I am bitter as well. It is the first shutter by Google that was annoying for me. I wish they at least open sourced it.
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
301–310 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#302Earlier 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.
For me, it was the way purchases and travel info were displayed. Right before the shutdown I've booked a fight and hotel for a conference in June and it was showing as a big card in inbox. After the gmail switch there is nothing displayed, I have to go hunting for confirmation emails. So sad to see inbox go.
Same here: I was struggling to find the confirmation to show the hotel at the desk a few days ago while in Inbox it was immediately clear.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
BeOS was indeed great, but its first version was released a few months after Win95.
So what? Windows 95 was terrible. It was just prettier than what came before it, and had a pre-existing library of software that would work with it ( i.e. every MSDOS app).
You say those like they aren’t both extremely important things. Windows 95 was the inflection point where desktop personal computers became “accessible” and coincided (despite their detour into MSN) with the commercialization of Internet in a way that bootstrapped our modern world. The computing world of 2019 isn’t perfect, of course, but don’t take it for granted :)
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#304Apple A/UX IMHO the final Apple product released before they turned intolerably smug.
Apple A/UX always felt unfinished to me. Great leveraging the partnership with IBM, but IIRC some Mac apps would fail to run in some weird ways.
I played with it as a sysadmin at work, on a Mac IIfx with thousands of dollars of RAM installed.
Did you ever get to play with the Apple Network Server? A rebadged IBM/6000 box.
Apple's approach to distributed network services was really great...
Alas. This era was like the Xerox Alto -- visionary, but required $10,000 to run.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#305Notion Ink Adam Tablet [1] Pixel Qi Display [2] Altogether not a truly great tablet, but I loved the idea of the Pixel Qi display. Normal colored LCD when being used indoors with backlight enabled. But outdoors in the bright sun, the colors faded away and it became some e-paper like reflective display. That way you could use it for watching movies in the dark and reading books on the beach ;-) Sadly the tablet had a…
ex-employee at notion ink. thank you for the love.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#306Google 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 discussions, I always feel like we’re circling around what Wave once was, and potentially could have been. It wasn’t fully polished, but so many of the fundamental concepts were there. If it had stuck I think communication in companies would be much better than it is now.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#307Pebble 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.
I've got the Suunto 9 smartwatch, it has always on display and battery usually lasts around 7 to 9 days.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#308JavaFX Silverlight Adobe AIR
HIPSTER ELECTRON
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#309Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#310VRML & Chromeffects - too early.
...and still too early!
VRML was far too ahead of human thinking, we ended up with a flat web of 2D rather than anything like what came with SGI demo discs back in the day. Frames as in frameset worked really well if you had a VRML world in one screen, the UX was immersive.
I helped my sister get a job with a VRML demo that fitted on a floppy disk. Disks, yeah. Application sent in the post with CV and disk - imagine that. Then imagine the person bothered enough to put disk in machine. Another world.
The VRML had some type of building with bits of my sister's CV in each room, you could click on things to hear stuff, see stuff or read stuff. The trips abroad for her degree were done in this interactive style, the view outside was the general scene of the countryside we grew up in, hobbies and interests were in there too.
She did get the job but never worked on anything as ambitious in this 'interactive media' job as what was on that 1.44Mb disk, even with vast teams. I really like it how VRML gave a glimpse to a future that was never to happen, not due to one's own helplessness but due to the lack of imagination and creativity going on when the rest of the web was flat table layouts. People preferred that to thinking in 'scene graphs'.