Ask HN: What are some good software ideas or products that never took off?

The recent news about how some COVID-19 data in England was lost due to using Excel has sparked discussion on Hacker News about the right tool for tasks like this (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247). In particular, many posters lament there is no consumer-facing database alternative that might have been amenable to non-developers. This made me wonder, why did 4th Generation Languages (4GL) tools like FoxPro, Clipper, Clarion, DBase, Paradox disappear? They were powerful databases with their own languages. They attempted to be more accessible to beginners or casual users than stand-alone programming languages. These 4GL products seem tailor-made for web projects that require database access. Instead we've settled on a mish-mash of clumsily glued-together and complicated solutions for web development with databases. Why did these 4GL tools disappear? Was there some snobbishness amongst programmers who didn't view these products as 'real' programming languages? The criticism of Excel also made me remember Lotus Improv - an attempt to re-invent the spreadsheet. That too, unfortunately, never took off. (This video gives an overview of Lotus Improv if you are not familiar with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M) What are some other good software ideas or products that never took off (or never lasted)?