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Amusingly, I've had the opposite problem: I see some things, think they are the best ideas ever and then watch them fizzle away. Perhaps the largest example of

by tikhonj 14y ago

Amusingly, I've had the opposite problem: I see some things, think they are the best ideas ever and then watch them fizzle away. Perhaps the largest example of this would be Wave. When I first heard about Google Wave, I was incredibly impressed and immediately signed up for the beta. I really did think it would replace email and IM--it was an elegant solution that did both, at the same time. I then played around with it, rather liked it and even got some friends to use it. I was still trying to use it well after almost everyone gave up on it. I was rather disappointed in its ignominious decline and eventual death. I also really liked webOS. All your apps would just be web apps! It would be great. It wasn't. I really loved the Zune HD. It had one of the best interfaces I had ever seen and was incredibly capable for its price. I still have mine, and I still like it, mostly. I've had people on the subway ask me about it simply because they didn't know what it was :P. I thought Gnome 3 was awesome and a gigantic step forward from Gnome 2. You could customize your entire environment, all in JavaScript. And yet almost nobody I know uses it. Unity may have gotten panned by internet critics, but at least plenty of people I know use it. Gnome 3? Maybe one person. A disproportionate number of the things that I get really excited about--rather than just interested in--seem to fizzle out. Maybe it's just selection bias, of course. I imagine the contrast between my expectations and reality make things stand out more. But it does seem that the more enthusiastic I am about something the more likely it is to flop. Right now, the technology that I'm really excited about in a very similar way is Rust. I hope it breaks this rather annoying trend! It's basically the only new programming language that I genuinely like and don't view as a waste of time and space. I honestly think it will take off, but that's what I thought about all the other examples too. I guess this doesn't have much to do with the actual article. It's just a lament about my own misplaced enthusiasm. But it does feel better to have written about it :P.

bsimpson 14y ago
The examples you listed died because of marketing, more than technology. Wave was essentially a social network that your friends couldn't get invites for if they wanted. It was a hugely hyped ghost-town. Wave was a tech preview because it was ungodly slow and made some questionable UX decisions (like badly reimplementing the scroll bar) - Google would have been embarrassed to call it a fully-fledged product. At the same time, they hyped it up like one, which led many people to pass judgement on it too soon, while the ones who wanted to use it either couldn't get access or didn't know anyone who had access to write to. webOS, from everything I've heard, was quite good. Unfortunately, the history of Palm didn't leave them enough resources to grow it organically - it was a high pressure do-or-die launch with rushed hardware that was universally panned. They didn't have enough resources to wait for good hardware to pair with it. They also banked on Verizon covering the marketing budget, but Verizon famously used Motorola's Milestone to launch the DROID brand instead. (There's a really interesting article from the Verge about it.) I don't know enough about Linux or Zune to comment on those, but you got excited about webOS and Wave because you saw the promise of the vision. The execution is what bungled both.
- joelandren 14y ago
  Google Wave didn't die because of marketing. It died because it was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
  - marssaxman 14y ago
    My problem with Wave was not that it was slow, but that it made me feel slow. I never got my head around the concept - I was never sure what it was trying to do, or why you would want to use it to do that. It felt like a tool designed by super-geniuses for other super-geniuses, something I was just too dumb to understand. I've heard many people say things like that about various computing-related technologies over the years, but Wave was the first time I could actually relate to it.
    - bane 14y ago
      I thought Wave sounded amazing when it was first announced. When I finally got an invite to it, I have to admit, I was deeply underwhelmed with the user-facing implementation. It's probably the slowest, least responsive, web app I've ever used. It also felt way over engineered, with far too many unrefined ideas crammed into it. That being said, I ended up being a big fan of it, hoping Google would eventually get around to fixing some of the obvious issues (they mostly didn't, though it did get slightly more responsive before it died). Why was I fan? I didn't think of Wave as a thing to do, like Twitter (you tweet), or Facebook (you friend and post), or a blog (you write a journal)...there never was a way to "Wave", just like there isn't one way to "e-mail". It was just a new set of communication tools that you could assemble however you wanted. It's no different than using e-mail to plan a party in one case or send photos to your mom in another case or applying for a job in another. E-mail is just a tool, the use-cases fall out of how you use that tool. For some reason Wave seemed to look like a solution in search of a problem, but I ended up finding several existing things that were better solved in Wave than with the existing workflows. The most notable was organizing a group around collaboratively writing a large document. Structured correctly and the work just kind of "fell out". The mistake with trying to use Wave was always in trying to use all of the features in Wave. I really miss it and am very glad to see bits and pieces of the idea slowly percolating into other Google products (Drive for example).
coldtea 14y ago
Man, you have a veritable talent for liking half-baked ho-hum stuff! I mean: 1) Google Wave -- a confused mess of a mail/im/web/social offering that didn't exactly knew what it was and solved non problems. 2) Gnome 3 -- Gnome 2 had languished for years. Why would 3 change that, especially since most of the changes planned were incremental ho-hum stuff combined with arbitrary rewrites of core technologies sure to take them years to complete? 3) Zune. Nuff said.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- dangrossman 14y ago
  What a mean-spirited and off-base comment. "Nuff said"? The Zune guys were 6 years ahead of the rest of the business -- their UI & UX design work became the basis for Windows Phone, Windows 8/RT and Xbox today. Zune failed because it was an expensive MP3 player launched when MP3 players as a category were being consumed by more capable general purpose devices, not because it was half-baked.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >"Nuff said"? The Zune guys were 6 years ahead of the rest of the business -- their UI & UX design work became the basis for Windows Phone, Windows 8/RT and Xbox today. Notice how you say that "The Zune guys were 6 years ahead of the rest of the business" and "it was an expensive MP3 player launched when MP3 players as a category were being consumed by more capable general purpose devices" (so, behind the rest of the business). It can't be both. The whole product/ease of use/market/ecosystem etc (which is what matters) was subpar. And the market had much better products already. Also, I'm not sure why you tout the Zune UI/UX work either. The only thing it had going for it was the visual look, not the feel or the interaction. So it was mostly a pretty graphic design, not a great UX. Same for Metro/Windows 8. It's not like that got any good reviews. Mostly a mismatch of traditional Windows and an out of place, and quite restricting and ill-thought touch UI. Oh, and it's not like Windows Phone got anywhere either. Nice looks, as a concept, but they forgot that design is how it works -- not how it looks.
habosa 14y ago
This is fairly tangental but I love my Zune HD. Still use it every day and I wish I could buy more for backups.
pepr 14y ago
Gnome 3 is far from dead compared to Zune HD (officially killed) or Google Wave (ditto). (Not sure about WebOS, I remember reading it was sold off.) The primary reason you don't see it around is that Ubuntu has such a large market share of the desktop Linux and chose Unity as the default. And few people bother (or know about the possibility for that matter) to change from the default even though it's trivial (apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop). But remember that Gnome 2 used to be the default and quite popular (i.e. everyone had it because everyone had Ubuntu). Now of course, I'm biased - I got pissed off with Unity, tried bunch of various desktop environments and settled on Gnome 3 and I really like it. The dynamic creation & removal of desktops feels strange at first but is so convenient after a while that I miss it everywhere else.

by tikhonj 14y ago

bsimpson 14y ago

The examples you listed died because of marketing, more than technology. Wave was essentially a social network that your friends couldn't get invites for if they wanted. It was a hugely hyped ghost-town. Wave was a tech preview because it was ungodly slow and made some questionable UX decisions (like badly reimplementing the scroll bar) - Google would have been embarrassed to call it a fully-fledged product. At the same time, they hyped it up like one, which led many people to pass judgement on it too soon, while the ones who wanted to use it either couldn't get access or didn't know anyone who had access to write to. webOS, from everything I've heard, was quite good. Unfortunately, the history of Palm didn't leave them enough resources to grow it organically - it was a high pressure do-or-die launch with rushed hardware that was universally panned. They didn't have enough resources to wait for good hardware to pair with it. They also banked on Verizon covering the marketing budget, but Verizon famously used Motorola's Milestone to launch the DROID brand instead. (There's a really interesting article from the Verge about it.) I don't know enough about Linux or Zune to comment on those, but you got excited about webOS and Wave because you saw the promise of the vision. The execution is what bungled both.

joelandren 14y ago
Google Wave didn't die because of marketing. It died because it was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
- marssaxman 14y ago
  My problem with Wave was not that it was slow, but that it made me feel slow. I never got my head around the concept - I was never sure what it was trying to do, or why you would want to use it to do that. It felt like a tool designed by super-geniuses for other super-geniuses, something I was just too dumb to understand. I've heard many people say things like that about various computing-related technologies over the years, but Wave was the first time I could actually relate to it.
  - bane 14y ago
    I thought Wave sounded amazing when it was first announced. When I finally got an invite to it, I have to admit, I was deeply underwhelmed with the user-facing implementation. It's probably the slowest, least responsive, web app I've ever used. It also felt way over engineered, with far too many unrefined ideas crammed into it. That being said, I ended up being a big fan of it, hoping Google would eventually get around to fixing some of the obvious issues (they mostly didn't, though it did get slightly more responsive before it died). Why was I fan? I didn't think of Wave as a thing to do, like Twitter (you tweet), or Facebook (you friend and post), or a blog (you write a journal)...there never was a way to "Wave", just like there isn't one way to "e-mail". It was just a new set of communication tools that you could assemble however you wanted. It's no different than using e-mail to plan a party in one case or send photos to your mom in another case or applying for a job in another. E-mail is just a tool, the use-cases fall out of how you use that tool. For some reason Wave seemed to look like a solution in search of a problem, but I ended up finding several existing things that were better solved in Wave than with the existing workflows. The most notable was organizing a group around collaboratively writing a large document. Structured correctly and the work just kind of "fell out". The mistake with trying to use Wave was always in trying to use all of the features in Wave. I really miss it and am very glad to see bits and pieces of the idea slowly percolating into other Google products (Drive for example).

coldtea 14y ago

Man, you have a veritable talent for liking half-baked ho-hum stuff! I mean: 1) Google Wave -- a confused mess of a mail/im/web/social offering that didn't exactly knew what it was and solved non problems. 2) Gnome 3 -- Gnome 2 had languished for years. Why would 3 change that, especially since most of the changes planned were incremental ho-hum stuff combined with arbitrary rewrites of core technologies sure to take them years to complete? 3) Zune. Nuff said.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dangrossman 14y ago
What a mean-spirited and off-base comment. "Nuff said"? The Zune guys were 6 years ahead of the rest of the business -- their UI & UX design work became the basis for Windows Phone, Windows 8/RT and Xbox today. Zune failed because it was an expensive MP3 player launched when MP3 players as a category were being consumed by more capable general purpose devices, not because it was half-baked.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >"Nuff said"? The Zune guys were 6 years ahead of the rest of the business -- their UI & UX design work became the basis for Windows Phone, Windows 8/RT and Xbox today. Notice how you say that "The Zune guys were 6 years ahead of the rest of the business" and "it was an expensive MP3 player launched when MP3 players as a category were being consumed by more capable general purpose devices" (so, behind the rest of the business). It can't be both. The whole product/ease of use/market/ecosystem etc (which is what matters) was subpar. And the market had much better products already. Also, I'm not sure why you tout the Zune UI/UX work either. The only thing it had going for it was the visual look, not the feel or the interaction. So it was mostly a pretty graphic design, not a great UX. Same for Metro/Windows 8. It's not like that got any good reviews. Mostly a mismatch of traditional Windows and an out of place, and quite restricting and ill-thought touch UI. Oh, and it's not like Windows Phone got anywhere either. Nice looks, as a concept, but they forgot that design is how it works -- not how it looks.

habosa 14y ago

This is fairly tangental but I love my Zune HD. Still use it every day and I wish I could buy more for backups.

pepr 14y ago

Gnome 3 is far from dead compared to Zune HD (officially killed) or Google Wave (ditto). (Not sure about WebOS, I remember reading it was sold off.) The primary reason you don't see it around is that Ubuntu has such a large market share of the desktop Linux and chose Unity as the default. And few people bother (or know about the possibility for that matter) to change from the default even though it's trivial (apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop). But remember that Gnome 2 used to be the default and quite popular (i.e. everyone had it because everyone had Ubuntu). Now of course, I'm biased - I got pissed off with Unity, tried bunch of various desktop environments and settled on Gnome 3 and I really like it. The dynamic creation & removal of desktops feels strange at first but is so convenient after a while that I miss it everywhere else.