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Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
331–340 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#332Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#333Usenet, IRC, RSS, XMPP, ... Well, still rockin'
As a person who has to use Slack (and its walled garde) every day at work, I miss the simplicity of IRC. I think it probably lost out due to stagnation when it came to features and ease of use for the technically non-inclined. But at least it was (and is) completely open.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my personal view is that they tried to become too big, and I don't think the wearables market is really that valuable I think you're spot on here. They had a perfectly viable 20-30 person company going in a nice stable little niche, and then the smartwatch hype cycle reached its peak and VCs threw a ton of cash at them along with a mandate to become the Next Big Thing. And so they hired way too many new people, chu…
Everything needing to become a unicorn today is killing a ton of good products and services. It's apparently impossible to just be a successful small business for a few decades in the tech industry.
Indeed. You see it here a lot, someone will be sneering at a business with $10 million annual turnover and 20 staff and calling it a "lifestyle business", as if owning a double-digit percentage of such a business is not an excellent outcome by any sane standards.
Venture capital might be the only way to fund a moonshot-style startup but it seems to be the kiss of death for already-established, already-profitable businesses.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#335Ubuntu's Unity desktop.
People really hated it because (IMHO) it had a really rocky launch. Ubuntu replaced a very usable GNOME 2.x desktop with an alpha-quality replacement. And Canonical was riding high from having "won" the Linux for desktop game and was pushing their weight around, giving the impression that they were ignoring the feedback from their users.
Unity wasn't without its missteps. But it matured quite nicely and I now prefer it to other desktop paradigms. Windows especially. It feels a bit stuck, like Microsoft thinks it reached peak desktop design in 1994. ;-)
Now that Ubuntu has ditched Unity, I really don't know what I'm going to do. I've been holding on running Ubuntu 16.04, but it's getting to be a burden. I don't like GNOME 3. I'm still not sure what to do. I might give Pop!_OS a decent kicking of the tires. I know that's still GNOME 3, but their take on it is the closest I've seen it get to tolerable.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#336Google 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.
Not OP. My only issue with the Gmail app is the ads that sneak in.
Using Spark for Android and it seems to be scratching the itch so far
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#337Ubuntu's Unity desktop. People really hated it because (IMHO) it had a really rocky launch. Ubuntu replaced a very usable GNOME 2.x desktop with an alpha-quality replacement. And Canonical was riding high from having "won" the Linux for desktop game and was pushing their weight around, giving the impression that they were ignoring the feedback from their users. Unity wasn't without its missteps. But it matured quite…
I ended up running kbuntu and was pleasantly surprised with it.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon. What about the Nintendo Switch?
It’s not a dedicated, it’s a hybrid.
I use mine 90% handheld and it works wonderfully as a portable console. There's nothing hybrid about the portable experience, it's just an extra option that you can safely ignore.
There's also rumors of a Switch Mini coming.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#339Ubuntu's Unity desktop. People really hated it because (IMHO) it had a really rocky launch. Ubuntu replaced a very usable GNOME 2.x desktop with an alpha-quality replacement. And Canonical was riding high from having "won" the Linux for desktop game and was pushing their weight around, giving the impression that they were ignoring the feedback from their users. Unity wasn't without its missteps. But it matured quite…
Isn't it still possible to install and use Unity? I thought it just lost Canonical's support and the spot as the default DE. I wouldn't pick a distro just for the DE it comes with.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#340V2