Angular 1. I must admit, Angular 1 is productive to me. But its custom directive failed so much for a composition model. It's a pity, though.
I feel like VueJs is a worthy successor, no?
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
471–480 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#472Grooveshark - one of the first/greatest music streaming services around. Comprehensive music catalogue, servers never went down, and UI was simplicity incarnate. Totally illegal business model, so it's not surprising that it didn't survive. But it was awesome while it lasted.
> Totally illegal business model
It was no different to YouTube’s...
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because most people are only associating it with gaming. And media outlets measure its success by checking if it is capturing the gaming market. But VR has applications beyond that. I mean, there is a new art form that let you paint in mid air. How are artists not all over this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW49IKs1kE A technology doesn't have to be something you spend time with everyday to be successful.
There's a huge barrier to entry for any of the possible applications that most people just don't want to risk. For art, it costs $10 to download photoshop, but it costs an average person $500+ (computer hardware and headset) to get into VR. There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it. I'm only seeing good things about VR gaming, though. It's definitely becoming more popular there. Lots of peo…
> There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.
I would say Goro Fujita is a well-known artist for his illustration work and he's now doing almost only VR pieces. https://www.instagram.com/goro.fujita/
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if they hadn’t, the PS2 is one of the greatest consoles of all time. It would have been a difficult competitor to go against.
It could have held it's own technologically, except that SEGA were complete dumbshits and their console supported burned CDRs out of the box. That was a coup de grace.
It may not have helped, but let's not call people complete dumbshits for leaving a loophole in their DRM. That was a mistake that could happen to anyone, and the outcome was decided by then anyway.
Now botching the Saturn launch because of political infighting between the Japanese and American branches of the company? If you're going to call them complete dumbshits for anything, that's what I would pick.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#475Oculus and other VR headset. VR as a technology is fascinating and almost Sci-Fi when it came in but people quickly realized that there are still no practical applications for the technology other than mild gaming and entertainment purposes. Companies invested heavily in VR but the ROI is poor till today. VR is mostly a one time experience for people and not something they spend time with everyday.
What a weird thing to say a couple of months before the release of oculus quest and valve index
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to actually look at the sales figures for the Atari 800. Atari and Commodore were outselling Apple in their day. Commodore did indeed outsell Atari, but Atari wasn't a failure.
Atari ST was another computer that failed. It used a DRI CP/M-68 and GEM with TOS with MS-DOS formatted disks. The Amiga outsold it, but the ST had the Magic Sac to run Mac programs as well.
The ST didn't use CP/M-68K (it did during early development, but pivoted to a newly written file system and loader before it shipped).
The ST failed because the Tramiels didn't really understand software platforms. They got hardware, but when it came to developing an ecosystem that could support developers over a long period of time they just couldn't compete with the likes of Apple and Microsoft (the ST's software team was 10-12 people, and I don't care how good they were, doing a long-term successful platform just wasn't going to happen with a team that small). Coupled with some predatory business practices, the writing was on the wall.
The Magic Sac was more of a curiosity than it was a serious solution to anything. I have a great deal of respect for David Small, but the product was never going to work for the 68020 and up Macs.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#477Google Reader. I still think RSS was a better way of aggregating news than many alternatives of today, all wrapped up in a solid and practical interface.
Google Reader was a success in that it dominated its niche for many years.
Have you checked ContentStudio.io
Gives you an option to curate the content or follow with rich query builder.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#478The best feature of recent years was when Google started showing you information from your emails on the Android smart home screen (swiping to the left). It was brilliant: have a flight tomorrow? It would show you the information, including gate information which is never on boarding passes anymore. It would show you package tracking info. Estimated traffic coming back from work today. Weather. It had really everythi…
You can still access it by opening the Google app and tapping on "Updates".
Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#479Wow, I’m surprised there’s nothing about the Lisp Machines/Smalltalk... Remember ‘Worse is Better’? And there is Xanadu, the ultimate hypermedia system. It’s a pity that no one (who could fund them) really understood the concept back then and it became vaporware...
Autodesk did understand the concept and fund them for a while. There are two reasons this conversation is not taking place via Xanadu:
1. The brilliant visionary wasn't also a skilled project manager, which is understandable enough, but unfortunately he didn't recognize the issue in time to take steps to either learn the relevant skills or delegate to someone who possessed them.
2. No viable intermediate steps. Version 1.0 insisted on being the whole shebang. They didn't manage to identify an MVP that would've been easier to build while still useful. Berners-Lee, by contrast, did identify such an MVP.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#480XMPP. The entire chat landscape is a damn travesty right now. First Facebook disappeared behind it’s own walls, then google... I really miss the days where I could use one client to chat with all my contacts. I honestly think Im in contact with less people now because everyone dropped support for open protocols.
A new player has entered the game! https://www.coi-dev.org/