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Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
I've often heard the claim that the startup graveyard is full of great products that didn't succeed (e.g. because the startup wasn't good enough on marketing, or because they didn't solve a big enough problem).
What are some examples of this?
If there are examples of truly great products that eventually died, I'd like to study them more in-depth.
- crappybird 8y agoFirefoxOS
- maxharris 8y agoLotus Improv Google Inbox SGI workstations Sun NeWS
- bufferoverflow 8y agoGoogle Reader Google Wave
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y agoLosing reader essentially killed RSS feeds for me. I tried importing my lists into other apps but it became a hassle
- vax 8y agoGive feedly another try. I've been using it ever since Reader got killed.
- michaelchisari 8y agoYears later, I'm still in love with Google Wave.
- ksaj 8y agoThe Sun Ray was ahead of its time. After Oracle bought and killed it, "the cloud" kicked up and is exactly what the Sun Rays were built for in the first place. Oops!
- technofiend 8y agoFrom the original NCD X-terminal to the current Citrix-based smart terminals there's definitely something compelling about putting the compute elsewhere and displaying graphics locally. Nvidia have to be very worried about Google's Project Stream because of the cloud model: someone aggregating compute and render resources means net selling less than when each person has their own. It also means far less opportunity to exfiltrate data. There would be no Snowden if he had a dumb terminal that refused to mount storage USB devices, for example. I'm kinda surprised the intelligence community didn't go all in on dumb displays for that reason alone.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoNvidia already has a product for game streaming that you can use today though!
- fyfy18 8y agoThat's going to happen to Nvidia anyway. They must be blind if they can't see that. Even today a very small percentage of gamers are using Nvidia chips, as most games are played on mobile. This is why desktop gaming hardware is getting more expensive every year, as it's becoming more and more of a niche market.
- chatmasta 8y agoNvidia was in the streaming game market before google got there. Their service, "GeForce Now," [0] is still in beta and allows playing games remotely. [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/waitlist/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/wa...
- Canada 8y agoWhat was the advantage of these over doing the same with Linux and PC hardware? The Sun Ray looked slick but like everything Sun made was ridiculously overpriced and slower than commodity PC gear. I don't see the advantage of thin clients over network booted thick clients anyway. It's way more performant and more economical to execute client software on the client CPU.
- quickthrower2 8y agoParse (although it lives on as open source and other providers, see. https://buddy.com/blog/parse-buddy-forever-free-full-features/ https://buddy.com/blog/parse-buddy-forever-free-full-feature... for example) Microsoft's WPF
- noitsnot 8y agoWPF hasn't succeeded? What am I missing?
- yodon 8y agoWPF definitely falls in the didn't succeed category. Microsoft grossly mismanaged everything around WPF and C# during the Sinofsky era. It's doing much better on the C# side today but the UI developer community left WPF long ago and will never return.
- maxxxxx 8y agoWPF is still pretty much the standard on Windows but it definitely could be much better. They just abandoned it and then went on these weird detours with Silverlight, WinRT and now UWP.
- yodon 8y agoI suspect the actual standard on Windows today, as hated as it is here on HN, is now Electron. The HTML based UI ecosystem is just so much richer and better supported than WPF that any theoretical advantages WPF might have are dwarfed by the practical considerations of just build it in Electron and be done with it.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"I suspect the actual standard on Windows today, as hated as it is here on HN, is now Electron." You may be right :-)
- 8y ago
- Eyes 8y agoSwype. It disappeared from my phone this week and I'm in shambles.
- elcomet 8y agoIsn't this integrated in all modern keyboards? At least Google keyboard does it now!
- austhrow743 8y agoIf I use the default keyboard instead of swiftkey on my iphone I can't swipe for words and have to peck at the screen like its 1860. So unless there's a setting I'm missing somewhere, no.
- rhizome 8y agoIf it's gboard, you might have to enable it in settings.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWhat phone is it, I use gboard (even though my Huawei has a Swype keyboard), Settings > Language & Input > gboard > glide > enable glide input. But if it's an Android just use settings search?
- austhrow743 8y agoIt's an iphone not android. I was letting the commenter know that it's not integrated in to apples keyboard, at least as far as I can tell.
- rhizome 8y agoGboard is pretty weak in comparison. Much worse spelling and its custom dictionary may or may not work, I have no idea.
- tatami 8y agoSwiping input yes, but the implementation of Swype was superior to the others like Swiftkey. I can't really describe, but it was better at capturing the words I swiped and also handled multiple languages better.
- valleyjo 8y agoRdio. Music Streaming service. Not sure what happened after they closed up shop but the UI was beautiful and they had great performance.
- dictum 8y agoI really miss Rdio! Just disagree on the performance a bit. The UI was fluid, but their network performance would take a hit from how their API had been designed: every action on the app would trigger a large JSON payload download (and sometimes upload). It definitely felt nicer than Spotify.
- zorked 8y agoI was sad when I had to switch to Spotify. Rdio was clean. Even today I don't understand Spotify. Rdio also had an amazing recommendation engine from Echo Nest. Even though that company got bought by Spotify it took them a long time after the acquisition before they had decent recommendations.
- cricalix 8y agoSomething I've been trying recently is the Spotify progressive web app. Pros: Snappier to use, faster to open, never see the "Updating spotify" interstitial. Cons: Spotify quits when I cmd-q Chrome, completely different UI layout to the thick client, doesn't understand the OS-level media control keys.
- a13n 8y agoVenture backed, took a big bet on Vdio that the market didn't care for, probably couldn't meet growth goals compared to their burn.
- ackbar03 8y agoFailing cause of taking vc money seems to be a recurring theme..
- 8y ago
- avivo 8y agoZeo
- goldenzun 8y agorapbits. music sharing app on imessage that was dope https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4 https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4
- hamandcheese 8y agoWebOS
- robbyt 8y agoIt's on my LG TV, and it's great
- _ix 8y agoI'll hopelessly upvote and/or comment any positive mentions of WebOS. I still miss the Palm Pre.
- bruceb 8y agoI have tried to get rid of old unused tech stuff, but can't get rid of my old Pre. The feel of it even without turning it on is a thing of beautiful design. Combined with WebOS which was the best at the time and for a while after. Palm built a better mouse trap but still died.
- belltaco 8y agoWindows Phone Zune
- haolez 8y agoI’m a Linux die hard fan, but the Windows Phone was indeed a great product. I liked mine!
- osrec 8y agoNever owned one, but interested about what made it great?
- eknkc 8y agoI had one. I think the interface was great. The OS was buttery smooth. Can't really remember the details but I really liked it.
- osrec 8y agoAh cool. Btw, my question was not sarcastic - just genuine curiosity.
- haolez 8y agoGreat user experience overall. Very fast and everything seemed tightly integrated.
- ryl00 8y agoFlat/Metro UI, live tiles, jump lists, dark mode. (I'm still using mine as a daily driver)
- rgoulter 8y agoHere are some examples of what I liked about using Windows Phone (7, 8): - The default keyboard is great. - Jump Lists: Alphabetical list navigation. (e.g. list of contacts, list of installed apps). For quickly getting to letter 'r', you tap one of the letters to bring up a grid with all the letters, then can easily tap which letter you want to get to. Whereas, iOS has a tiny list of letters on the side. Android sometimes has this tiny list of letters, too. I prefer "1 easy tap, 1 easy tap" is nicer to "1 fine/precise tap". - Icon-buttons would have labelled text. To save space (I guess), the text was omitted but was still accessible by expanding the menu. - IIRC, older WP models had a hardware camera button (on the side, for taking pictures or opening the camera app). Later on, the cheaper WP models dropped this. That said, the lack of apps is what really kills it. :/ e.g. you might only need 2 or 3 apps which you can find on Android or iOS, but not on WP.
- sien 8y agoThe Amiga.
- ilaksh 8y agoI feel like just because a product fails to dominate the planet doesn't mean it didn't succeed. Amiga achieved quite a lot in terms of engineering for it's time.
- scrollaway 8y agoRelevant and incredibly high quality video on the languishing of the Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ
- gnuarch 8y agoUsenet, IRC, RSS, XMPP, ... Well, still rockin'
- rcfox 8y agoThe game Warframe uses IRC for its in-game chat. They've obfuscated the authentication though, so it's not possible to just login with something like irssi. I'm sure other games do this as well.
- isatty 8y agoNot a game but twitch chat is basically IRC. You can indeed login with irssi if you wanted to.
- nopacience 8y agoIMG its true https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc/ https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc/ Long live IRC
- ignaloidas 8y agoOsu! also uses IRC for it's game chat, but it's not obfuscated . IRC is good enough for game chat, you don't really need anything more, unless you want to integrate voice-comms too. Actually, I once made multiplayer-over-IRC in a game jam, as the interface is so simple and flexible.
- kebert 8y agoReally enjoying TheLounge for IRC lately. FreshRSS as well. Any recommendations for self hosted XMPP stuff?
- dasyatidprime 8y agoI still run a pretty basic ejabberd on Fedora. I've heard better things about Prosody, nowadays. (A while back I didn't transition to it due to some incompleteness in IPv6 support, but I'm told that that has since been fixed.)
- didymospl 8y agolast.fm Although it didn't die yet, it certainly doesn't live up to its potential.
- EamonnMR 8y agoI know last.fm entirely as a site that you get in search results for song titles and lyrics but forces you to log in. What service does it provide exactly? Was it just a very early streaming site with great seo?
- bri3d 8y agoNo, it started as a "scrobbling" service where you could send data about each track you listened to from the player and service of your choice. For a brief time it was a decent social network and recommendation tool, and it could have been a lot more with the volume of data collected but has languished.
- GlennS 8y agoIt was a streaming site which also had plugins for various media players to let you track what you listened to. Then you could see tables of what you listened to most, see what your friends listened to, and get recommendations. I think what happend is that last.fm failed to get deals with the recording companies, while Spotify succeeded (somehow?). Nowadays I use Spotify like everyone else, but I feel like last.fm gave me much better recommendations. Probably because it had many many years or listening history.
- andai 8y agoYeah, you used to be able to stream on Last.fm, then only in UK, Germany and Japan (iirc), and now it uses a little Spotify widget.
- Zoo3y 8y agoAs someone who scrobbles everything I listen to, I love last.fm There's a lot of other active scrobblers and music communities who use their last.fm profiles to compare their music tastes. Developers have made their own scrobbling extensions for youtube and soundcloud, as an example. Other cool projects use last.fm's API to aggregate someone's scrobbles and make cool visual charts. Every online music community I know of uses some form of this data to share what they listen to.
- mephitix 8y agoGoogle Inbox. And I don’t “find my favorite Inbox features in Gmail”. If you can’t tell I’m still bitter about it :(
- ikeboy 8y agoAlso Google (reader/fiber/insert several dozen other cancelled Google programs)
- ksaj 8y agoLike Google+ that shuttered just days ago. I loved the Lisp and Raspberry Pi communities there. It was surprisingly productive, and probably entirely because of the features (and missing features) that scared people away from even trying it.
- paulsutter 8y agoEmail enhancement products need an offbeat name like Superhuman, not a noun every email program already has (inbox). Seeing it in the App Store, how would I know I don’t already have it?
- city41 8y agoIt’s so good and I already miss it so much I’m kinda considering attempting to clone it. At least the features I particularly liked anyway.
- jonas21 8y agoJust 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.
- daxterspeed 8y agoPersonally it's the bundles and pinning. The bundles just worked more consistently than Gmail's tabs and made it feels fast (and safe!) to quickly archive a bunch of promo emails you weren't currently interested in. Stars can be made to work like pinned e-mails, sort of, but it not consistent across the mobile app and the website and the UX just feels unresponsive in comparison. Pinned emails were much better separated than starred emails are today. I think a bonus aspect was just design. Inbox didn't have to support as much legacy as Gmail and its design ended up being really sleek. Inbox overall just felt faster than using Gmail.
- x11 8y agoNokia linux tablets/phones n800x series and their Maemo OS
- darpa_escapee 8y agoMaemo was great. I still have an N770 and N810 kicking around.
- x11 8y agoI still have mine but its literally a brick . The screen broke many years ago , so I used it back in the day to hack the ps3. Someone coded the geohotz hack into a payload in the kernel on boot up. Oh memories.
- nikofeyn 8y agoyou reminded me of the nokia lumia 920. great design, camera, and screen, but hampered by a nascent os. nokia really seemed (seems?) to understand hardware.
- vvillena 8y agoSoftware too. The Nokia-made apps on the 920 were all extremely polished and worked perfectly with the rest of the phone.
- thepangolino 8y agoI’m so bitter the N9 got canned.
- rocky1138 8y agoSega Dreamcast. All Sony had to say was "PS2 is coming next year" and everyone stopped listening to what they could get today.
- shhehebehdh 8y agoEven 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.
- rocky1138 8y agoIt 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.
- orionblastar 8y agoI had a friend with a Dreamcast he had to mod it to play CDRs as the Dreamcast had a different CD format to hold more info. They had to reduce the CD to fit in a 700M CDR. Most games didn't use the full CD. Google mod chips some time they had them for the Playstation and XBox to use CDRs.
- ac2u 8y agoYou didn't have to physically mod the Dreamcast console. An exploit was found due to the console support for CD's with multimedia support, called MIL CDs. Initially a bootdisc was needed which you swapped with a CD-R, later all dumps of games were done in such a way that the exploit was bundled. You are correct though in that some games used the full 1GB+ capacity of the GD-ROM format and assets had to be removed/compressed in some cases.
- rwallace 8y agoIt 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.
- jwildeboer 8y agoThe mugshot project. 2006. it could have been so much. But it was ahead of its time, I guess. (Disclaimer: I might be biased, I work at Red Hat) https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/
- ikeboy 8y agoChangetip was neat but got acquihired and shut down
- chrstphrhrt 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
- moeffju 8y agoDrop.io. Got bought by Facebook I think and was unceremoniously shuttered. Last.fm, well. I really miss it. Windows Phone and especially the Metro Design (although some of it carried into Modern UI).
- jakelazaroff 8y agoLast.fm is still around! Although I guess you could say they didn't succeed, per se.
- arendtio 8y agoNotion 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 lot of other flaws and the colors of the LCD weren't as good as the AMOLEDs we are used to today, but every time I see one of those ebook readers with b/w display I wonder why the Pixel Qi displays didn't make it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_tablet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
- ajflores1604 8y agoI was actually googling them this past week to see what happened to that company and the guy who started it. Looks like he's doing a computer vision AI company. But I remember seeing the first Notion Ink tablet ages ago at some online coverage for CES and thinking it was the coolest thing out at the time. A shame it had so many production issues. Even the second iteration had a clean design and a cool screen on the spine of the device.
- corysama 8y agoIMHO, Pixel Qi should have gone full-bore e-ink replacement. They’re color was always embarrassing. But, in black and white mode it was wonderful. Super crisp, 60fps and low power.
- realrocker 8y agoex-employee at notion ink. thank you for the love.
- jdougan 8y agoI have an OLPC laptop, and I still love that screen.
- espeed 8y agoBeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war
- alok-g 8y agoCanonical Bazaar Microsoft Encarta
- wreath 8y ago> Microsoft Encarta This was replaced by Wikipedia for me, but I really enjoyed reading about stuff without any distraction (read: Internet access at home)
- mftrhu 8y agoYou can still do that- the Wikipedia dumps are available, and without media they come up to some ~15 GB for the English Wikipedia. Kiwix (one of the browsers for the dumps) is even available for Android. They have been an almost literal life saver for me in 2012-2013.
- teddyh 8y ago> Canonical Bazaar As I understand it, The Breezy project is an active fork, and is also reportedly compatible with Git file storage: https://launchpad.net/brz https://launchpad.net/brz
- jelling 8y agoOS/2
- karmakaze 8y agoWell OS/2 v3.0 became Windows NT so sort of succeeded, just not for IBM or in name (unless you count cash registers).
- bhouston 8y agoSpiritually maybe. The lineage between the two isn't official.
- dragonwriter 8y agoWindows NT is what the project Microsoft was working on as their planned next version of OS/2 got renamed after Microsoft and IBM broke off their partnership and IBM kept OS/2.
- karmakaze 8y agoTrue. I was working with OS/2 pre-releases at the time. https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/OS%2f2+NT https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/OS%2f2+NT Also, Wikipedia "OS/2 NT" redirects to Windows NT.
- ksaj 8y agoThat's not particularly accurate. Windows NT was based on VMS. OS/2 is quite different. The interfaces are related, but the same is true for all Windows variants on the grand timeline. The good news is that if you are feeling particularly nostalgic and have a 16 or 32 bit processor (or emulator), you can relive the OS/2 glory days with ArcaOS from https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ It'll cost you about $130 for a personal license, but if you want it, it's still there, and still supported.
- 8y ago
- vax 8y agoYahoo Pipes was an excellent tool for mashing up RSS feeds.
- Fuzzwah 8y agoI had one of the most complex Pipes rigged up to automate the collection of all the content I created or favorited from all over the web. It merged them all into a single rss feed which my very simple bit of python code scraped and output as static html on my "blog". When yahoo killed off pipes I found https://github.com/nerevu/riko https://github.com/nerevu/riko and realised that the visual aspect of pipes was holding me back. Having said that, the visual aspect of pipes was what made it easy for me to get into the whole idea of "stream processing". So I have a lot to thank the pipes team for.
- jdougan 8y agoNewton MessagePad 2000 and 2100
- Yetanfou 8y agoThe promise of a decentralised internet where the distinction between producer and consumer is entirely up to the person at the keyboard.
- rocky1138 8y agoNAT killed this dream.
- test6554 8y agoHaving to buy static IPs rather than just getting one with your internet subscription.
- rocky1138 8y agoI wish there had been stronger pushback legislatively for these two (and other) attributes of ISPs.
- quickthrower2 8y agoAnd the "A" in ADSL.
- hrdwdmrbl 8y agoThere's still hope in this front
- convolvatron 8y agotechnically it wouldn't take much (or anything really) for people to transition to a v6 overlay network and get this back again. but i'm afraid that the value of an intermediary-free internet isn't really perceptible enough to drive adoption, even if you made it completely painless. I meet an awful lot of people, even in tech, that are surprised and shocked that you can use a computer thats not sitting right in front of you. or that two computers sitting next to each other can exchange data without using some third party service. computing-as-television really won - just like how for the longest time quite a number of people thought that microsoft windows was the canonical definition of what a computer was.
- karmakaze 8y agoJavaFX Silverlight Adobe AIR
- jtbayly 8y agoThis 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.
- ncmncm 8y agoYes. Snark. Then there was the Moonlight knockoff based on Mono. And Mono itself, of course. Dead ends before the project ever started, but they finished and shipped them. Let's not neglect .Net. But we're supposed to be talking about good products, not misbegotten ones. So: Apple Newton!
- bri3d 8y agoConceptually 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.
- hutzlibu 8y agoAbout AIR you probably heard hate from people who hated flash. I loved it, (the technology, not Adobe) but also switched plattforms. Node is a mess compared to it.
- karmakaze 8y agoNot kidding. I evaluated the capabilities of these platforms and there were some differences but all were better than existing solutions then and now. Flutter on the desktop might be a contender. Can't think of any others.
- watersb 8y ago
- purplezooey 8y agoTesla
- ncmncm 8y agoToo soon. :-)
- gtf21 8y agoPebble 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't think the wearables market is really that valuable. They could have remained a small house which maintained a great product for a segment of the market that really appreciated it. I'm sure that's a simplistic view, and definitely ill-informed since I wasn't on the inside. I still think they are far better than the Apple Watch or any of the Android Wear devices I've seen.
- ben-hudson 8y agoMaybe you'd be interested in http://rebble.io/ http://rebble.io/
- taneq 8y ago> 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, churned out too many new models, and collapsed when the market just wasn't there.
- icelancer 8y ago
- ryeon 8y agoturntable.fm was super fun! wish they had something like this now.
- agotterer 8y agoYes! I miss turntable. They nailed social listening and built a really awesome community. It would be awesome if they could bring it back using Spotify or something similar.
- toomanyrichies 8y agoI came here to say this. I and multiple friends were active users and mourned its demise. Wondering whether it was due to lack of demand or operational issues. If it was the latter, that implies the concept might in fact work under a stronger team (or one with deeper pockets). I’d love to see a company like Spotify try to resurrect it. Or even (shudder) Apple. On the one hand, it’d be a drag to have such a lovely service owned by a corporate behemoth. On the other hand, any losses would basically be couch money for them, and I’d be kinda OK with them mining my music data in exchange.
- milkytron 8y agoI think it was due to licensing. No source (just a thought), but I could imagine a startup like turntable.fm being pretty simple to build, the trouble comes when the legal portion of the entertainment industry gets involved.
- flylib 8y agohttps://www.producthunt.com/posts/roadtrip-3 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/roadtrip-3
- jjcm 8y agoplug.dj is a close replacement, otherwise I made mashup.fm which downloads a copy of whatever you add to your playlist (in case the source got taken down, something very common with the mashup genre due to copyright fingerprinting working very poorly with mashups). The source for that is here: https://github.com/nthitz/mashupfm https://github.com/nthitz/mashupfm
- freehunter 8y agoMicrosoft Courier. A dual-screen tablet that was basically OneNote in hardware form.
- oblomovshchina 8y agoThat was exclusively Ballmer's fault for axing it iirc. The ideas for the device were amazing. It could have captured a lot of that creative market that Apple owns now. Tragic, really.
- hevi_jos 8y agoThis actually never existed. It was vaporware. A good video showing what something should be, not what it actually was.
- sagebird 8y agoPlan 9
- sagebird 8y agoSome comfort can be had in knowing that some of the soul or atheistic moved on into golang. Though I imagine the joy of using golang to pale in comparison to the experience of using an os so orthogonally constricted, as well as creating hybrid programs via file based plumbing. If Plan 9 was the dominant os for the last decade, I think the very feeling of being on a computer would be different— similar to the way that sitting in front of a windows 10 desktop, an iPhone, a RPi, a Mac II or C64 are all so different.
- BubRoss 8y agoNokia's maemo phones were great, both of them.
- clydethefrog 8y agoGowalla. Using geographical location to find digital items way before Ingress and Pokemon Go. The design was gorgeous too.
- tomcatfish 8y agoGeomon was a really fun game that was almost exactly what Pokemon Go became, but without as hard of a "grind" feel to it, but Yahoo bought it and killed it. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/4bn-mistake-yahoo-bought-precursor-pokemon-go-2013-then-killed-game-1572835 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/4bn-mistake-yahoo-bought-precursor...
- pdeva1 8y agodotCloud and a lot of other PAAS platforms. Its ironic since with Docker + Kubernetes, folks essentially are recreating their own PAAS from scratch, but wouldn't use a prebuilt one...
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoBut there are other PAAS that are great and successful, e.g. Firebase
- chatmasta 8y agoDocker only exists because it was developed at dotcloud. I'm quite happy with Docker, and certainly wouldn't trade it to have dotcloud back.
- colechristensen 8y agoSwitch light bulbs. Beautiful design, great natural light color, engineered to dissipate heat very well (and thus last a long time), they got on the cover of Wired. However they overdid the packaging and had a hard times convincing people to buy $60 light bulbs and only sold in strange stores.
- chrisco255 8y agoDo you mean these: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Light-Bulbs-LED-Bulbs/SWITCH/N-5yc1vZbm79Zd6x https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Light-Bulbs-LED-Bulbs/S... ?
- colechristensen 8y agoYes, those are the ones. (out of stock everywhere, company shut down, in case it isn't noticed)
- colinng 8y agoAeroscope. Probably the nicest portable oscilloscope I've seen. It fizzled away, and until CrowdSupply found a few units, I couldn't even buy a spare for just in case. https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireless-oscilloscope https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...
- ilaksh 8y agoBetamax
- Ftuuky 8y agoStumbleupon Tastekid
- ilaksh 8y agoLight Table
- kris-s 8y agoLight Table has a new maintainer, so Miracle Max might yet be able to help. http://lighttable.com/2019/03/31/New-year-old-plans/ http://lighttable.com/2019/03/31/New-year-old-plans/
- alok-g 8y agoWhile it had rave reviews, I never thought it was scalable beyond teaching how to code. Chris Granger then proposed Eve which also has wound down.
- codeadict 8y agoRiak
- rwallace 8y agoThe Atari 800. Beautiful design, but initially overbuilt and too expensive for the market; I suspect two different home gaming machines from the same company also confused consumers; later, when a lower-cost version was released, Commodore had already started gobbling up market share.
- protomyth 8y agoYou 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.
- orionblastar 8y agoAtari 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.
- icelancer 8y agoAtari ST was crushing Amiga for years until Commodore got their stuff together and bifurcated the product line into the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500 while also getting good games on the system - plus the Video Toaster and other accessories to finally take advantage of the multimedia superiority of the platform. It didn't really matter in either case since IBM and its clones were destroying both of them with Macintosh stealing the non-IBM market share all the same.
- kabdib 8y agoThe 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.
- egypturnash 8y agoAmiga: born a champion, but Commodore fucked it up.
- icelancer 8y agoIBM and the clones were destined to run them over from the beginning, though. IBM's penetration into the home market as take-home business machines meant it was only a matter of time before multimedia got to the wide deployment of an already-accepted platform with much, much better software. I loved Amiga. I still wear Amiga shirts to work, and it was massively influential (I owned a modern-day Video Toaster for streaming, even!) - but IBM was gonna win, especially since they split the marketshare with Atari ST and then Macintosh.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoChevy Volt. I wouldn't necessarily say it wasn't successful, but GM is killing it, and to me the irony is that I think it is a much better option for 90% of people than an all-electric vehicle. Yes, all-electric is the future, but right now being able to be on battery 95% of the time, but never having range anxiety because I can always get gas when needed, is wonderful. I can go on long trips and never worry about having to pre-plan where I will charge up. Also, I didn't have to do any special electrical work because I can get a full 40 mile charge overnight on 12 amps. I think it's really a great car and due to the electric motor it's fun to drive for someone who doesn't generally like driving.
- yumraj 8y agoThere are still Prius Prime and Honda Clarity.
- dominotw 8y agoI bought one. It had terrible battery that gave me less and less range on every charge. Resale value was non existent. Piece of garbage.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoTo each their own I guess. I bought a 2015 Volt used and have owned it for nearly a year and a half and it's the best car I've owned. I consistently get 40-42 miles a charge.
- dominotw 8y agomaybe i just got a defective battery or something :D
- lukifer 8y agoLove my ‘11 Volt, averages 62mpg, including several road trips. Super smooth to drive and nearly zero maintenance; I’ll never go back to a combustion drive train or gears if I can help it.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoNeXT.
- jmalicki 8y agoHow did NeXT fail? Apple bought them, and then released NeXT-based designs with Apple branding, down to the APIs! I only use a MacBook today because it's a NeXT derivative.
- zubairq 8y agoYes good point. Many people forget that all Apple stuff is really NeXT
- patrickg_zill 8y agoA "fully loaded and maxed out" NeXTStation Turbo was: 68040 at 33MHz 128MB RAM 4096 color, 1152x832 (or similar) display that could do Display PostScript and had a relatively complete Unix subsystem under the covers. The Turbo Cube (same CPU but with the 24/32 bit color NeXT display board) could do full color. Current minimum specs to be happy on MacOS: dual core 2+ghz CPU, 8GB RAM, SSD drives Failure or not of NeXT? Not sure.
- drfuchs 8y agoSegway. 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).
- stewbrew 8y agoI 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.
- closeparen 8y agoThe Segway was predicted to become what the electric scooter has instead.
- Tomte 8y agoAnd people realized cities aren'r barrier-free. There are lots of stairs and similar obstacles that not only cannot be navigated on a Segway, but the Segway is much too heavy too easily carry it over those.
- magicalhippo 8y agoWell Segway itself may not have succeeded, but I see more and more people roaming the city on self-balancing scooters.
- WD-42 8y agoXMPP. 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.
- alanthonyc 8y agoWouldn’t that qualify as more of a technology than a product?
- visiblink 8y agoI love XMPP. I self-host a prosody server for a group of gopher and public access Linux server users. It's a niche market!
- com2kid 8y agoXmpp is a disaster, I have otp enabled and all too often messages are delivered to the wrong machine, but encrypted with a different key, so it is pure garbage and lost forever. That is on the off chance that the message is actually delivered. Trying to get omemo up and running, but some clients (pidgin) have next to no support for it, while others only support it, and it seems it is only supported on ejabberd as of very recently, with documentation on how to enable it consisting of a comment line in a config file. I am not inclined to positively review a chat protocol that frequently fails to deliver messages.
- catdog 8y agoYou mean OTR? 1. OTR is some old hack and not really usable 2. OTR has nothing to do with XMPP at all OMEMO only really needs XEP-0163, the thing which also gives you avatars and such, supported nearly anywhere. There is some problem that you can't access the key of someone who did not add you yet to the contact list on older implementations [1] but that does not make it unusable. > I am not inclined to positively review a chat protocol that frequently fails to deliver messages. XMPP delivers, if you encrypt them with the wrong key it can do nothing about. [1] https://gultsch.de/omemo_by_default.html https://gultsch.de/omemo_by_default.html
- OneWordSoln 8y agoNot startup-related, but: Long-life incandescent light bulbs. They were done in by "planned obsolescence"; I haven't watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU) yet but it has a good ratio. I can't stand the light from LED or fluorescent light bulbs, and GE can pour themselves a warm bath.
- jdietrich 8y agoThe efficiency of an incandescent lightbulb is directly proportional to its lifespan. Long-life incandescent bulbs are a false economy. The problem with LEDs is simply that people buy based solely on price. A Yuji high-CRI LED lamp is genuinely indistinguishable from an incandescent lamp, but you'll never see one in a hardware store because they're slightly more expensive. https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights
- scurvy 8y agoRingly. It was a well executed niche product that was priced at for-profit margins. Not sure why the company went under, but they did. As anyone with kids know, not everything needs to have a screen or be "smart" (aka pain in the ass). There's a lot to be said for simple, elegant functionality and long battery life. I'm sure that they could relaunch with a 10 person lifestyle company.
- darpa_escapee 8y agoPalm/HP Pre. Coming up on a decade since it was released, and it's still the best phone I've ever owned. Too bad about Palm and HP, though.
- jccalhoun 8y agominidisc didn't exactly flop but it should have been a lot bigger than it was. Great hardware. If Sony hadn't insisted on their ATRAC and drmed it to hell it would have been much more competitive.
- anyfoo 8y agoReading how MiniDisc flopped is always a bit confusing to Europeans (and, presumably, Japanese), as it was actually relatively popular over there. It‘s true that prerecorded media never gained any traction, but for recording your own media from CDs or radios (or later MP3s) it was reasonably common. People especially liked how compact the portable players were. Then Sony pretty much messed it up with NetMD.
- alexis_fr 8y agoI bought a Sony MD player. They had « A USB device to transfer CDs onto MDs ». The USB device was a simple USB-to-jack, to which you’d plug the MD’s line-in. So disappointing. It transfers CDs to MDs at speed exactly 1x and without song separation, because you just press play on one side, record on the other.
- tass 8y agoIf you used an optical connection track breaks would make it into the copy. At least that’s what mine did, but it was still slow (real time).
- dehrmann 8y agoI miss how reliable magneto optical storage in a cartridge is. The physics behind it mean the data should be readable for a very long time.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoIt was a massive success everywhere except the USA. But because the USA defines history, it was a "failure". Wonderful video about the format: https://youtu.be/kU3BceoMuaA https://youtu.be/kU3BceoMuaA
- sonnyblarney 8y agoBlackBerry. You would get your mail instantly, and could effectively IM on it. I'm still not even sure how often my iPhone polls or updates, that said it's been a while. The 'absolute connectivity' of the BB I don't think has been repeated since. I'm getting sick of features, and honestly I think that's what I want now - a black and white BlackBerry. Just smaller.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThe old Skype.
- pier25 8y agoIt wasn't successful?
- sonnyblarney 8y agoWell, it died and gave way to some other abomination.
- wetpaws 8y agoSkype was never good
- ggm 8y agoMultics
- JdeBP 8y agoThis would be based upon the myth that Multics failed, yes? * https://multicians.org/myths.html https://multicians.org/myths.html
- ggm 8y agoI read the page. I think on any terms we understand the net final outcome is pretty betamax
- trn 8y agoMultics, while not a 'massive' sales success in retrospect, was certainly not the failure commonly believed and wasn't treated as one in the press of the time - at least not until after the decision was made by Honeywell-Bull to phase out the Multics (and CP-6) products to focus on GCOS. "Honeywell is having considerable — and surprising — success with the ultra-secure Multics operating system … Besides 3-5 systems within Honeywell, Multics has been installed or committed within Nippon Electric, Rome Air Development Center, USAF Data Services Center, and Ford" was widely reported in the mid-1970's industry press.
- unused0 8y agoAnd two systems to the NSA.
- charpede 8y agoWasn'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.
- jjakque 8y agoIt was rebranded to PixelSense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense), giving its name to the Surface we know of today.
- jobigoud 8y agoWe had one. It wasn't "great" the touch screen had too much latency. I think it was around $8K.
- wj 8y agoGoogle's Nexus 7 might qualify. A really great tablet at an affordable price that got one minor refresh then was cancelled. I see Palm already mentioned. Neo Geo. Obviously everything I have done was great--too advanced for its time to succeed.
- city41 8y agoNeo Geo as in the game platform from SNK? I’d argue it was very successful, being supported for 14 years. The thing is the arcade version of it was the real product, the home version was more a novelty.
- milkytron 8y agoI still use my Nexus 7 almost daily! I have the refreshed model with the 1080p screen, and it's still going strong. Not the fastest or most up to date tablet, but internet browsing, email, and basic things all still work flawlessly. Great product, competitive sector.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoI have the first gen, which was sadly made unusable due to flash write speeds.
- zanny 8y agoSomehow my 6 year old second gen Nexus 7's battery still works reasonably well and I have no idea how. I've been through dozens of batteries on Galaxy phones in that time.
- technofiend 8y agoI adored my Nexus 7 and really wish Google would do it again. On the other hand it's hard to compete with Apple's A12 that's found in their modern iPad line up. Still, I'd gladly take less performance at half the price to stay in the Google ecosystem. It's why I have a Pixel instead of an iPhone despite their being closer in price; I'm not down for the secondary rent of paying for iTunes subscriptions and splitting photos or data across two platforms.
- 8y ago
- modarts 8y agoGoogle Wave
- mamp 8y agoPath. A private social network with a great UI. We set it up for our extended family and the children could use it without exposure to Facebook etc. Path had nice UI innovations that were later merged into other platforms. I guess people prefer a bigger audience over privacy.
- gloira32 8y agoWait, what? Path was one of the (if not the main) reasons that Apple added the contacts permission in iOS 6, because they sent the whole list to their servers, and then texted people. https://www.cultofmac.com/144946/path-uploads-and-stores-your-iphones-entire-address-book-on-its-servers/ https://www.cultofmac.com/144946/path-uploads-and-stores-you...
- joelaaronseely 8y agoTivo AOL
- jdietrich 8y agoSteinberger guitars. They were brilliant to play, they were incredibly lightweight, they were near-indestructible, they could stay in tune for weeks, but they were just too weird to be anything more than a fad. It didn't help that Ned Steinberger had questionable business skills, they never really got manufacturing costs under control, but the basic design was utterly brilliant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinberger
- throwaway8879 8y agoI own several. I'd trust any gear used by Allan Holdsworth. Not that it will help sound like him! I'm digging the recent explosion of headless guitars, Strandberg et al. I started playing on a Strat-shaped body so anything different throws me off. Even the bridge position on a Les Paul type body spooks me. I guess one of the reasons headless/compact guitars don't go outside of the niche of progressive/fusion circles is that it just doesn't have the "cool" factor or traditional bodies. Imagine Duane Allman with a Streinberger, or Clapton, Page etc. Just seems out of place I guess.
- parenthesis 8y agoI don't know whether this counts as `cool' or not (David Bowie's Tin Machine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtOjC0NLFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtOjC0NLFw
- tim333 8y agoWhile I like Bowie the guitar on that song sounds a bit nondescript. Maybe if there was a famous riff on one it would help.
- wyclif 8y agoFor a while, Sting also played a Steinberger bass with The Police. I believe Andy Summers, their guitarist, also had a Steinberger guitar but didn't play it in concert, only in the studio IIRC.
- 8y ago
- ncmncm 8y agoApple A/UX IMHO the final Apple product released before they turned intolerably smug.
- city41 8y agoHuh, I’ve never heard of it before now. Unix based but with system 7’s UI sounds very appealing.
- watersb 8y agoApple 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.
- ncmncm 8y agoI had it on an SE/30: 16 MHz 68030, maxed out at 8MB of RAM, 1M per stick. (Later you could get bigger sticks; I never did.) It had floating point hardware 5x as fast as the IBM PC-AT's coprocessor. The whole machine with 80M disk was $2400, in 1990 dollars. It had one slot, taken by the 10Mb/s ethernet card, and a 512x342 monochrome 1-bit-deep display. It ran MacOS7's GUI, and it was as responsive as anything you run today.
- rbritton 8y agoiPod 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.
- _s 8y agoThe replacement is more likely the Apple Watch and wireless head / earphones.
- taurath 8y agoThat works pretty well for me. Wish the watch worked better as a stand-alone device though - it does enough but if you need to reconfigure it you have to do it through the phone
- rbritton 8y agoGood point — I missed that option. That’s at least a less expensive change than a phone, but it’s still a minimum of $400 vs the $150 of the nano. It’s vastly more expensive for those solely wanting a music player.
- runamok 8y agoMuch more expensive in comparison.
- kopos 8y agoGtalk - the very lightweight IM +1 XMPP - in still finding it puzzling that it's not deployed and used more often
- wetpaws 8y agoWhen google killed desktop gtalk client, it left a void in my life for years that only recently telegram could fill.
- sytelus 8y agoWinAmp ICQ
- sfRattan 8y agoYou can get a relatively recent beta for WinAmp. It was leaked online and the current owners of the software (Radionomy) chose to release the beta[1] following the leak so that people could download from an official source rather than resorting to piracy and grey-area download sites[2]. They claim to be working on a new version but, in the meantime, the leaked/released beta is a perfectly serviceable version of the software. [1]: http://www.winamp.com/ http://www.winamp.com/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_5.8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_5.8
- alok-g 8y agoWinamp development may be in limbo today, but I would never call it a failed product. It thrived very well, influenced a lot of future products, and also still lives with many users including me.
- xivzgrev 8y agoWINAMP! It really whips the llama's ass.
- danilocesar 8y agoNokia N9 + Meego/Maemo devices.
- milkytron 8y agoWebOS. When I used it, I saw it as a blend between Android and iOS. It had the beauty, polish, and responsiveness that I loved on iPhones, but had the developer options and open community that Android had. It was a great product, and it's a shame that now we really only have two choices for smartphone operating system, WebOS being neither.
- lintroller 8y agoI recently helped a friend wall mount a new smart TV and when the boot animation displayed WebOS, it made me incredibly disappointed about how far it had fallen.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoSo many great things about modern smartphones came from webOS — the card metaphor, universal search, swipeable notifications. The way they integrated third-party services into the OS was so seamless; I still miss the messaging app that combined texts and conversations from other services into one thread per contact.
- bruceb 8y agoWebOS is the Snapcaht of operating systems (course Snapchat still lives, but doesn't get anywhere near the reward of all it pioneered).
- 8y ago
- sfRattan 8y agoAereo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo The Supreme Court decision that killed the company is an excellent example of what happens when jurists don't understand technology... And don't want to, either.
- anbop 8y agoThe Supreme Court decision wasn't at all a failure to understand technology... their ruling basically said "the technology here doesn't matter, it's what the technology does that we are ruling on." Aereo brought arguments around the implementation and the Supreme Court said basically that they didn't care about the implementation.
- bsder 8y agoAereo deserved to die. They were a scummy company that lied and deceived at every turn. Aereo actually had some good arguments, but they were so shady that there was no way anybody was going to believe them when the time came.
- taurath 8y agoTo me it doesn’t even pass the smell test - you can’t rebroadcast content you don’t own, else there’s no point for the content makers to make it. There’s some interesting legal points but to me as a layperson it’s like watching a cammed movie.
- bnkamalesh 8y agoMicrosoft Zune
- oneowl 8y agoPS vita. Powerful handheld. Dual analog sticks. Great hardware. Lots of good games but it could never compete with the smart phones. 3DS didn't do too well either as compared to DS. I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon. I'm sad because I don't really enjoy playing games on my mobile phone.
- MegaButts 8y ago> I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon. What about the Nintendo Switch?
- geddy 8y agoIt’s not a dedicated, it’s a hybrid.
- taurath 8y agoIt could absolutely get smaller in the next gen - I think to keep it cheap, relatively powerful and have acceptable battery life is the main reasons it’s as large as it is.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoI 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.
- Nition 8y agoI think the earlier comment is just saying that it's not a dedicated handheld in the sense that you can only use something as a handheld. A major feature is that it can do more than just be a handheld device.
- Xelbair 8y agoIt dosen't compare to vita. size of Vita is more comfortable for portable gaming, and it is way more comfortable to play than Switch(controller ergonomics aren't great in Switch).
- orionblastar 8y agoOS/2 A better DOS than DOS A better Windows than Windows Microsoft used the OEM tax to force Windows preinstalled than OS/2. Then development dwindled and Microsoft made Visual Studio for Windows. It is still a good OS and OSFree is trying to open source it. http://www.osfree.org http://www.osfree.org
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- MehdiHK 8y agoVisual Basic Classic (VB6)
- zubairq 8y agoI loved this and think the next Mass market IDE could be like VB6
- MehdiHK 8y agoRethinkDB
- bothra90 8y agoPrismatic (used to be at https://getprismatic.com https://getprismatic.com) - a topic/interest based newsfeed platform, but backed by an ML/AI system to learn from your reading behavior. I loved the product until it got shutdown one day :-(
- mattdeboard 8y agoiirc Prismatic was always an experiment in the technology, and I think they got the data they wanted before moving on. But yeah I used it as well and miss it. Fond memories from my enthusiastic clojurist days :)
- basementcat 8y agoOpenDoc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
- apexkid 8y agoOculus 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.
- TaylorGood 8y agoOne of the founders is a neighbor.. $20m later. They lucked out with FB/Zuck frothing over their company so early.
- Nextgrid 8y agoI wouldn’t call it luck. Sure, the money is good, but their company is now essentially dead and should never be trusted to do anything good (just like every single thing Facebook does ends up having nefarious goals behind it).
- TaylorGood 8y agoLuck only in the sense of how early they were as a company and the premium Facebook put on them.
- Nextgrid 8y agoI still wouldn’t call it luck. Their company and product is now dead, and any good use they envisioned for the product is now forgotten in favour of nasty and user-hostile use-cases.
- jobigoud 8y agoIt'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW49IKs1kE A technology doesn't have to be something you spend time with everyday to be successful.
- apexkid 8y agoGoogle glass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass A pure ingenious effort to turn humans into cyborg by adding the 4th dimension of computing to their lives in a non intrusive and seamless way. I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular given that wearable tech like watches and fitness band is catching up so quickly.
- anonytrary 8y agoWearing another pair of glasses is pretty intrusive. The value added (if any) by Google Glass clearly wasn't enough over the phone for how much more intrusive it was.
- rememberlenny 8y agoGoogle Glass is actively produced and successful in the enterprise space. The consumer market wasn't the ideal demographic, but it pivoted and continued development.
- icelancer 8y agoRandom people hate being watched, or at least they hate knowing they are being watched by another person. That being said, like someone else mentioned, Glass and AR-type products are very successful as productivity boosters in people who assemble products. We use Pupil Labs' glasses at our business to do gaze tracking. There's a lot of good use cases for this technology, but it's not cheap and it's pretty specific at this time.
- k__ 8y agoI think it would have been a better product without camera. Having some of the smartphone info in a HUD is a killer feature in itself, much better than a smartwatch.
- dswalter 8y agoIt's not entirely clear what you're saying here. Does your business use these solutions as a way to enrich the information needed used by someone assembling your products, or do you use them to ensure everyone's eyes are looking in the correct direction while on the assembly line?
- test6554 8y agoGoing outside
- k_sze 8y agoBeOS, a modern operating system that supported SMP, preemptive multitasking, and a journaling file system waaaaay before Windows 95 was even released.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 8y agoBeOS was indeed great, but its first version was released a few months after Win95.
- k_sze 8y agoThe release was after Windows 95, but I thought they had those modern OS features already working long before that?
- pmiller2 8y agoSo 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).
- Lammy 8y agoYou 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 :)
- jaclaz 8y agoWell, AFAICR at the time (on the same hardware) BeOS ran circles around any Windows OS, including Windows 98 (and besides both NT 4.00 and 2000), particularly with graphics and web/browser. And (again on same hardware) it was if not faster, much more pleasant to the eye than most Linux distros. Surely it needed less memory and processor power than the competitors or however felt on limited resources very "snappy".
- 8y ago
- orionblastar 8y agoBeOS and BeBox, made BeOS for PowerMacs until Apple stopped providing support for new boxes. Was going to be bought out by Apple to make the new MacOSX but they bought out Next and got Steve Jobs back. HaikuOS tries to open source BeOS: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
- orionblastar 8y agoThe Commodore Amiga, it had the advantage until Macs got color cards with the Mac II series. VGA gave IBM PCs with Sound Cards an advantage. The Amiga had true multitasking for a 68K Machine and even ran MS-DOS and MacOS with emulators. Problem is they could only get game makers to write software for the Amiga. The business software, video editing, etc came too late. They still make Amiga systems with PowerPC chips now. AROS is an open source of AmigaOS 3.1: http://aros.sourceforge.net/ http://aros.sourceforge.net/
- perilunar 8y agoVRML & Chromeffects - too early.
- Theodores 8y ago...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'.
- hawaiian 8y agoXUL/XPCOM (Someone else already said Google Wave.)
- oceanghost 8y agoHear One earbuds. Fantastic sounding, weighed only 14g and the noise canceling and filtering really, really worked.
- znpy 8y agoStumbleUpon.com - It proposed links and webpages to read, and as you liked/disliked them it used to learn what you like in order to propose other, better-fitting stuff. Apparently it now has "joined" mix.com, where you can only join via Facebook, twitter or google authentication. Thanks but no thanks.
- whatamidoingyo 8y agoI came in here to say this. Ctrl+f "StumbleUpon". Probably one of my favorite ideas. Was sad to see it go.
- Teslazar 8y agoI know it's not the same, but using the "related" feature in Google can be very effective. example: "related:news.ycombinator.com"
- jefftk 8y agoC-thru Axis-49. Velocity sensitive hexagonal midi keyboard. Came out just before Kickstarter, and had early issues since a lot of their preorders fell through. Also shipped with the awful Harmonic Table layout, and needed manual conversion to Wicki-Hayden. But it's an amazing instrument, with everything right under your fingers.
- zubairq 8y agoVisual Basic 6
- cb504 8y agohaha. once vb6 ruled the world, so it is hard to say that it didn't succeed. In the end the grim reaper came for it, it's time had come.
- zubairq 8y agoYes a good point. I think when VB 6 disappeared then so did a good drag and drop component market place too
- ransom1538 8y ago+ Fist bump. One day I will have something as good as VB6's IDE. Right?
- zubairq 8y agoYep. I am trying to recreate VB 6 and the component market place with my own project at yazz.com, but I still have a long way to go
- indentit 8y agoAndroid touchscreen phones with physical slide-out qwerty (though I would have preferred Colemak ;)) keyboards like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro. So much quicker and more comfortable to touch-type on (ironic, no? :)), I barely ever made any typos.
- timwis 8y agoCheck out the fxtec pro1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/slider-phone-reborn-fxtec-pro1-delivers-android-9-plus-slide-out-qwerty-keyboard/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/slider-phone-reborn-fxtec-pro1...
- Samon 8y agoThat looks amazing... will be interesting to see if it actually releases though.
- znpy 8y agoI had a Samsung Galaxy Chat. Miss that thing, it was awesome.
- nichos 8y agoBlackberry still makes Android phones with keyboards.
- colejohnson66 8y agoBlackBerry is still around?
- afandian 8y agoThe latest Blackberry branded phones are quite good. I've just bought a Blackberry Key One and it's just as good as my HTC Desire Z from way back when.
- Samon 8y agoThis. I really miss my HTC Dream and Desire Z.
- indentit 8y agoan alternative to common spreadsheet software, which I mentioned before at [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290728
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- danpalmer 8y agoGoogle 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.
- Lowkeyloki 8y agoI agree! I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off. I'll admit it was a hard sell when you boot into a blank page that looks like a word processor. It was sadly ahead of its time and was probably pitched to the wrong audience from the start. Rather than trying to explain why Wave is better than email and chat to the internet at large, they probably should have pitched it as a business productivity tool. Oh, well. Hindsight is 20/20.
- 0-_-0 8y ago> I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off. I wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.
- gcb0 8y agobecause that would have required a single product person, and Google have none. Google only have failed engineers turned product manager. they live and die by some random metrics. the gmail PM would never accept anything there that reduced time spent (or some other random, disconnected from reality, success metric) by a second!
- 8y ago
- watersb 8y agoMagic Cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 8y agoInbox by Google. SIGH.
- noeltock 8y agoHypercard
- bkyan 8y agoLiveCode, which contains a superset of Hypercard's functionality, is still going strong, as far as I could tell.
- HHalvi 8y agoI miss not having a new Nexus every year given that Pixel lineup has neither lived up to be a worthy contender for the iPhone nor has it managed to appeal to the Nexus audience. Second to that is probably the void that Sunrise, Carousel and Rdio have left out. I still haven't worthy replacements to all of them.
- luord 8y agoAgreed, the best phone I ever owned was the Nexus 5. Currently I have a pixel 3, and technically there isn't much of a difference, meaning that its far larger price tag hangs heavily on it.
- typenil 8y agoI've found the Pixel 2 to be far more stable and less laggy than either of my Nexus 5x's. (Went through 2 because the bootloop bug bricked the first.) Not that I think Google's hardware is doing a bang up job. Pixel buds are the worst headphones I've ever owned.
- ldigas 8y agoGoogle Reader :-(
- Lowkeyloki 8y agoThe saddest part, I think, is that it's not just Google Reader. It's a loss of the content. Google Reader was just the canary in the coal mine. RSS used to be a first class citizen on the web. Remember how browsers used to show the RSS logo in the address bar if the site you were at offered a feed? Now, if the feeds aren't gone completely, discoverability has at least become a huge problem.
- ldigas 8y agoGoogle 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.
- jayalpha 8y ago"I still think RSS was a better way" "I still think RSS is a better way", fixed that for you.
- Deivuh 8y agoIt was the best way for me until most of the sources I used to follow started to only put the description of the post or article and a “read more” link forcing you open a browser to read it. I know most rss clients now have a built-in browser but it was better when you could read the content right in the client without those intrusive ads or layout.
- zanny 8y agoWhich is why providers all added those click through links. They write articles for ad money, and RSS readers don't get the ads.
- arkitaip 8y agoGoogle Reader was a success in that it dominated its niche for many years.
- sdx23 8y agoNokia N9 and its OS: Meego. Imho this was in so many aspects "UX just done right".
- Nition 8y agoEverything worked in harmony on the N9. Even the slightly curved screen worked together with the swipe-based interface. It'd be brilliant on an all-screen phone like an iPhone X (so would its successor Sailfish for that matter). No buttons to emulate. I wrote a post about the alarm clock[1] a while ago, which I feel is pretty indicative of the thought that went into each feature. Too bad about the rare bug that never got fixed that could show a received SMS under the wrong contact. Or the bug (which did finally get fixed by the community) where if you received an SMS with emoji in it, it would silently just never show the whole message at all! [1] http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-clock/ http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-...
- finchisko 8y agoI had N900. Loved that little linux phone.
- raverbashing 8y agoKilled by the Symbian feud within Nokia and being considered "a toy" by other higher ups, hence the Maemo/Meego rewrite instead of focus and shipping (I might say one of the issues with lack of focus was relying too much on desktop linux components, as Android went down a different path, but that's a discussion for another time)
- Lowkeyloki 8y agoUbuntu'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.
- christkv 8y agoI ended up running kbuntu and was pleasantly surprised with it.
- opan 8y agoIsn'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.
- Smithalicious 8y agoI really don't get why they ditched unity since I didn't have the impression that it was (still) unpopular.
- finchisko 8y agoI miss Unity too. Sometimes I catch myself with feeling to compile Unity8 from src. :)
- squeezingswirls 8y agohttps://github.com/ubports/unity8 https://github.com/ubports/unity8 ;)
- jayalpha 8y agoV2
- scarejunba 8y agoAmie.st : a website for legal song downloads that did demand-based pricing. Prices started at zero but as they became more popular, their value would rise. You could also "recommend" songs and if their value rose, you'd get the difference in value credited to you. Rewarded early participants in music discovery. Clever mechanic.
- jacobedawson 8y agoI really thought Thalmic Labs Myo was going to give us the Minority Report-esque future we deserved: https://www.zdnet.com/article/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-myo-gesture-control-armband-project/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-myo-ge...
- krcz 8y agoI believe CTRL-Labs took over that goal and is actively pursuing it: https://www.ctrl-labs.com/ https://www.ctrl-labs.com/
- nothanksmydude 8y agoYour thoughts are wrong, plain and simple. Delusional at best. It was so far from a great product that I'd like a list of other things you think are good so that I can avoid them. This is a very personal device segment, and privacy/security should come before everything else. I couldn't imagine being naive enough to think some nonamers could achieve this, or that android is even worth mentioning in this context. Apple's the only one to actually ship a compelling and useful product in any capacity past mere novelty. Pebble was a dogshit piece of hardware with an absolutely dogshit API. It was far from slimline, nearly unreadable in most real world conditions (try reading an exit number off your wrist while you're on a motorcycle, I'll wait), slow as hell, and wildly insecure. They were also extremely fragile (they are incapable of surviving a common skateboard fall, let alone a brush with a brick wall while walking). Nothing screams quality like soft rubber buttons most commonly found on happy meal toys and TV remotes and a screen reminescient of a tamagatchi. I used those survival scenarios because they are all things my fruit watch has shrugged off without so much as a scratch! Actually took a chunk out of the corner of the brick wall when I accidentally swung my wrist into it :X Pull the wool from over your eyes and look back into all the promises they made, and then walked back from. Do you remember when they told us it'd have sapphire crystal faces? Or injection molded ceramic bodies? The myriad list of features that silently fell by the wayside. They're a textbook example of how to fleece idiots on kickstarter. By the way, part of their problem wasn't that they tried to get too big, it was that they preferred large numbers of cheap hires. They weren't being hired for their talent, they were being mined for their social capital. This is an extremely common tactic found in other industries such as the loan/mortgage refinancing industry. Hire graduates > harvest referrals from friends and family who think they're helping this person look good at work > gone 18 months later with nothing to show for it. Before you write me off as a hater, know that I was one of the very first backers on kickstarter and was so utterly disappointed that they had missed the mark to such an extent that I threw it in a macerating toilet and flushed it, then tweeted the video to the CEO. It's so much more than hate. It's vehement disgust. I just spit on the ground The 1st gen apple watch by itself is leaps and bounds more useful. I specifically mention the 1st gen watch because of the way it works with the phone (similar to how og pebble functioned, only, not pants on head worthless), and also because it's still the thinnest amongst their roster. If you never used it for anything else other than haptic feedback to know wether you will have to turn left or right while driving, and heart rate/steps, it would still be leagues above anything Pebble ever managed to ship. Good rittance. I'm not interested in anything you have to say in response to this. I just want everyone else to know that pebble was so far removed from anything resembling "great", let alone "good" or even "merely ok"
- quickthrower2 8y agoI just thought, would Linux's "init" fall under this category with systemd. I am not from Linux background but I've been reading about this recently.
- Smithalicious 8y agoI think systemd is a bad thing but I also don't think pre-systemd init systems were a "good product".
- JdeBP 8y agoHow many of them do you know well? Indeed, how many of them do you know?
- JdeBP 8y agoYou should read a lot more. The predecessor of systemd was not what you think, and there was not just one. The software is not even "init". * http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18823871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18823871 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361168
- quickthrower2 8y agoThank you
- nothanksmydude 8y agoOk mister hall monitor I'll be sure to give a fuck next time I make a new account
- DanBCsucks 8y agoBet you money this guy worked for pebble. Here's a link to the original comment in it's uncensored format https://ghostbin.com/paste/kuxfy/raw https://ghostbin.com/paste/kuxfy/raw
- 0-_-0 8y agoNot necessarily. I also had a Kickstarter Edition Pebble and I have similar sentiments...
- kissgyorgy 8y agoGoogle Inbox The ONLY email client I was satisfied with.
- tgb 8y agoThe 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 everything I wanted to know about the next couple days, pulled together in one place. It actually felt like the "virtual assistant" we were promised. It completely disappeared a year or two and was replaced by a crappy news feed that is so poorly displayed you often can't even read the entire headline. Please tell me Google just his this feature and it still exists.
- chpmrc 8y agoYou can still access it by opening the Google app and tapping on "Updates".
- tgb 8y agoThanks!
- kyrra 8y agoAlso, I think if you swipe left from the home screen, there is a button at the top next to the ... menu (that's the Updates menu). This brings up your coming up next, weather, and other cards like that. It's always been there since they started showing need by default.
- tgb 8y agoGood to know! What a strange little icon... (Oh, I guess it's like a physical inbox tray?)
- revskill 8y agoAngular 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.
- newsbinator 8y agoI feel like VueJs is a worthy successor, no?
- tpaschalis 8y agoFirefox OS was revolutionary as an idea, but the timing was not there. If it came out a few years after, who knows what could have been. :(
- zimbatm 8y agoCheck out https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/ , it's a fork of Firefox OS for feature phones.
- zimbatm 8y agoCheck out https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/ , it's a fork of Firefox OS for feature phones. > By mid-2019, KaiOS will be running on over 150 million devices around the world. If that's true then Firefox OS is quite successful
- jinjiang 8y agoEricsson T28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_T28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_T28 It has an awesome feature: quickly press the power button when it's off, and then you can see what time it is now. I really love this feature because with it I could quickly see the time without turning it on or waiting, for example when I am falling asleep or on the plane. But haven't seen this similar feature any more. So sorry for that.
- harel 8y agoThe Commodore Amiga. Excuse me while I go reminisce....
- rodneyg_ 8y agowww.airwavemini.com
- wslh 8y agoCommodore Amiga? It took several years for the PC world to have a similar capable standard machine?
- sorum 8y agoIts run was short (less than a decade), but during the late 80s it did fairly well: reportedly 5-6M units [0] sold. It was popular in Europe, less so in the US; similar to Sony MiniDisc, which was actually successful globally during its run, but just not in the US. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Commercial_success https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Commercial_success
- ksec 8y agoFirewire, Had Apple not insisted on the Royalty may be we could have a world with better I/O. Instead everyone jumped ( back ) to USB and USB 2.0
- pcr910303 8y agoYeah... I agree. It took 20 years for the FireWire to be widespread enough for companies started to make products for them (Thunderbolt 3).
- avinium 8y agoGrooveshark - 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.
- fabricexpert 8y ago> Totally illegal business model It was no different to YouTube’s...
- colejohnson66 8y agoAre you referring to VEVO? Because VEVO is entirely legal
- avinium 8y agoNo, I think they are referring to YouTube's early days, where the company allowed/encouraged (and even participated in) the upload of huge amount of unlicensed content. It's a fair comparison, but I suppose YouTube had: (a) the veneer of being a platform to "upload/share your own videos" (c.f. Grooveshark, which was solely for copyrighted music) (b) savvier management (?) who knew how to play the media/copyright business.
- quickthrower2 8y agoVEVO isn’t all music on Youtube
- dgellow 8y agoGoogle wave, definitely. I still haven’t found an alternative that suits me.
- ksec 8y agoExcluding some of the mentioned ones like Google Reader, ICQ, Winamp etc. All them were at one point in time Champion in their own respective domain. They succeed at the time, so I don't see how it is a failure. They could just be more accurately described as killed or failed to move forward and compete. So far Google Wave, Pepple Smart Watch, XMPP, Unity, WebOS, Zune, Windows Phone. I don't see any of these as "great" at all. And they aren't better in any sense. Google Wave might have succeeded if it was aiming at business use case, but for average consumers I doubt anyone are interested, and that is why it was shutted down. I have yet to see a single consumer who looked at the UX of Zune, Windows Phone, Unity and thought I wish my Android / iPhone has that. It is the same thing again and again, Engineers, or Nerds are designing what they thought was good, trying to solve problems where consumers don't have or don't care. There are many case of SaaS successes because their market are filled with the people having the same problem in business or Engineering.
- tyleo 8y agoWith respect to Windows phone, I only heard good things about the UX from users. I heard many complaints about the lack of apps though.
- willtim 8y agoIMHO the windows phone live tiles made the static iPhone icons look very dated (they are essentially unchanged from 1980's NeXTStep). Even now I believe the iPhone clock and calendar icons require privileged hacks to show the correct date and time.
- fabricexpert 8y agoHow many times have you opened an iOS app to see what the red notification was and then realised you already knew what it was? It happens to me all the time, with windows phone the widget told me as the notification so I saved a lot of opening and closing apps. iOS does feel like a very dated os these days.
- vvillena 8y agoThe Nokia 920 is still the phone I've been the happiest with, of all I've had. A catchy design, a screen with a sunlight mode that worked, amazing call quality, great photo quality, great video quality, and impressive audio recording. On top of that, the Windows Phone UX was so good in making you aware of everything at a glance. While Android makes you unlock the phone then swipe down to see your notifications, Windows Phone simply got all the info you needed on the home screen. Quicker, simpler, better. Shame about the apps, yes. Google actively tried to kill Windows Phone by not making apps for it and cutting API access from lots of 3rd party apps. And while the Nokia apps were extremely good (Nokia Cinemagraph was so ahead of its time, seriously), that's not enough to sustain a whole mobile OS in this era of closed apps and walled sites.
- pcr910303 8y agoWow, 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...
- rwallace 8y agoAutodesk 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.
- fma 8y agoJawbone Bluetooth headsets. They offered the best noise cancelation and at one point was everywhere. Their execs made their products cheap and inferior, required payment for software updates.
- mvaliente2001 8y agoSmallTalk could have been used by Sun instead of Java.
- peterwwillis 8y agoYou don't need to study these things in depth, the studying has been done. Google "why good products fail", read some articles, check out some books.
- jasonwilk 8y agoDetour. What a great app that is so educational and fun. Was sorry to see it get acquired. They are hundreds more cities that could use this.
- chanux 8y agoEverpix http://www.everpix.com/ http://www.everpix.com/ When I first found it, I knew that's the photo backup I need. But when I was ready to pay for it, it was closing down. I thought it'd be a great fit at Amazon. But Alas, some great products don't succeed.
- wslh 8y agoFriendfeed? [1] It was a great social media aggregator. Groove Networks [2] a serverless team app. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed [2] http://www2.sys-con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/0309/maurer/index.html http://www2.sys-con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- elankart 8y agoUnpopular opinion: Windows Phone?
- radarthreat 8y agoIf it had come out in 2008 instead of 2010, it would have dominated.
- bane 8y agoBeOS
- beefman 8y agoMozilla Persona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona
- sergiotapia 8y agoOh shit! I remember this thing! I wrote some example code for asp.net mvc3 back in 2012 haha https://github.com/sergiotapia/ASP.Net-MVC3-Persona-Demo https://github.com/sergiotapia/ASP.Net-MVC3-Persona-Demo
- Deivuh 8y agoGoogle Talk (client). It was the best IM out there back when MSN started to get bloated with features and plugins like MSN Plus. I remember that when I switched to GTalk, I still kept MSN for some of my contacts that I still chatted with, but eventually those people switched too and there was nothing left in MSN for me other that contacts with long and overly decorated status messages. The official GTalk client was simple and lightweight. But then it died and the only official client was within Gmail, which I eventually stopped using because I missed so many messages when I was “online” while it was sitting unnoticed in tab on my browser. I know GTalk is still alive and there’s WhatsApp, Telegram and such but I guess I miss the synchronous conversations back then, when people would still say “You gonna be online tonight? Let’s talk about it there”
- wdr1 8y agoBeOS.
- jayalpha 8y agoChumpy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby
- kabdib 8y agoThe Apple Newton. Tons of really interesting stuff under the hood (a scripting language inspired by Self, an object store with transactions, a micro-kernel inspired by Mach that supported threading, virtual memory and fine-grained permissions, etc., etc.). Pretty whizzy for 1992. The hardware was too expensive and bulky, and the software tooling was never really there (I remember someone on the team comparing our dev tools with the newly released Visual Basic). The first release of the Newton was plagued with bugs (it shipped maybe 4-6 months too early) and had a hardware issue -- noise in the digitizer -- that made its handwriting recognition system perform very badly. Early consumer experience with it wasn't great, and that painted the product with fail and derision; the Doonesbury cartoon was accurate at the time.
- steQ 8y agoOS/2 warp. A great operating system.
- milkey_mouse 8y agoI still have and use my Zune HD. It works relatively well, is very small, has a long battery life and headphone jack, and most importantly I get the ironic hipster cred for using a Zune in 2019 ;) The "Metro" design language of the Zune devices, including the HD, influenced the Windows Phone and other Microsoft products. The Zune was the first device to have the tile layout many miss from the Windows Phone. Zune Music Pass, an all-you-can-listen monthly music subscription service à la Spotify, was way before its time. I think it was the first such offering ever. Unfortunately its "app store" had a total of 47 apps. On the plus side, you can install every Zune app ever at once :P It also runs IE5, I think? Maybe IE6? It barely supported CSS at all.
- Madmallard 8y agoI'm sure many, many games didn't, due to market visability.
- jayess 8y agoPriceline Gas.
- yitchelle 8y agoNokia 3310, the first version. It was the most reliable, solid mobile phone I have ever had. Battery life is really long, talk quality is very good, screen does not crack when you drop it.
- benki 7y agoI understand the sentiment, but the Nokia 3310 was a giant success. Over 100 million units sold.
- knopkop_ 8y agoToshiba Libretto
- norin 8y agoMicrosoft Zune.
- sloaken 8y agoMy love life ... of course I might have a career as a comedian if my wife does not see this.
- zenzonomy 7y agoTwitFog - Allowed you to watch all of the images being uploaded to Twitter in real time. It was the closest we ever came to being able to watch the Matrix unfold.