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.
646 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadGoogle Inbox
SGI workstations
Sun NeWS
Google Wave
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.
[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/wa...
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.
The segregation and amplification of the server/client roles is what makes me connect it to modern cloud computing. Your local device capabilities (speed and space) isn't nearly as important as long as it has a capable Presentation Layer and a network route.
Microsoft's WPF
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.
You may be right :-)
OT: At one of my former employers we were building a PLC. The sister team was building the IDE to program the PLC, and the compiler.
All of us were behind schedule. But our colleagues from IDE world staged a presentation for the whole project including top management (owner, CEO etc.) where they showed how far they were.
They showed how they have multiple windows inside the main application window, minimizing and maximizing those. Syntax highlighting. Basically everything Eclipse is giving you for free. Actual business logic: none to be seen.
Now they are working on cross-platform and that's why it had a feature freeze ( + because of graphics). It's now being added in .net core though.
So it's not dead at all
Edit: I’ve used firebase a lot and found it to be a great experience, enabling some of the most rapid product development I’ve ever done. Real-time db, login, cloud functions, and integration with google cloud are all great. Just wondering if there’s something cool or different about parse/buddy worth looking into. Also curious if it was different than firebase and wonder if it died because it wasn’t.
I remember the delight I had when I started using VB4, the immediacy and productivity. WPF is the polar opposite to that.
It disappeared from my phone this week and I'm in shambles.
At least Google keyboard does it now!
But if it's an Android just use settings search?
I can't really describe, but it was better at capturing the words I swiped and also handled multiple languages better.
It was abandoned and later bought out by Pintrest.
http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/text-what-i-mean-not-what-i...
If it’s gone that’s one less reason to switch back to Android.
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.
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.
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.
Closed and recovered as OSS by the former dev of the company as « OpenWhyd », and still accessible for free on a server, but he’s getting tired.
Zune
- 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.
iPhone 4 was released before WP7.
It’s a shame, my WP8 phone is still my favorite smart phone ever.
No Google app suite, which Google is absolutely allowed not to make. So Microsoft made the apps for free for Google, google said no, then Microsoft released their own brand clients (e.g. Microsoft YouTube client, Maps, etc) and Google shut it down with lawyers.
Can any platform survive without Google ecosystem support? If Windows Phone was the case study then likely not.
You forget, or I forgive you if you never knew, that google made really good apps on the old Windows Mobile. Google Maps was especially good on WinCE. Then Microsoft declared all Win32 apps dead in favor of a very half baked Silverlight runtime that didn't have such luxury features as sockets or scrolling that actually works. So if I were calling the shots on Google's end at that time, no way I am going to advocate for a massive rewrite onto a runtime that doesn't work well for a very small number of users.
Microsoft's own boneheaded actions killed Google's goodwill for its mobile platform.
Microsoft made the apps for Google, then when that failed released them themselves with no expectation of Google taking over/paying for support. So your point isn't at all relevant to what happened in the Windows Phone situation.
As I said right at the start of my post: Google is fully entitled to refuse to produce apps for Windows Phone. That isn't the problem here, Google effectively blocked their API on that specific platform and their strong market position strangled the platform to death.
The apps that MS made for third parties were rush jobs and poorly maintained over time, and because the Silverlight runtime was not up to the job, performed poorly. They did not well represent their respective brands. They were nowhere near the quality of Google Maps for WinCE circa 2009, to say nothing of how they stood against their contemporary equivalents on iOS and Android.
Would you really want a bad app, that cannot do what your real offerings do, out there representing you, with your name and logo?
The Google apps Microsoft produced worked extremely well right up until the day they got pulled due to legal threats. I'm not sure what this is a reference to.
> because the Silverlight runtime was not up to the job, performed poorly.
XNA ("Silverlight") was only one of the platforms Windows Phone supported. It also had support for Windows Phone App Studio and the Windows Runtime. The Windows Runtime never had poor performing characteristics and was the most popular platform after WP8's release.
> Would you really want a bad app, that cannot do what your real offerings do, out there representing you, with your name and logo?
No, but since that wasn't the reality I don't see the relevance of the question. It is largely a strawman situation where the apps were bad (they weren't), had bad performance (they didn't), and were developed using "Silverlight" (they weren't).
You say you post this information a lot on this site. It is unfortunately you didn't research before the first time you posted it.
I guess the two API and forced hardware changes did most to cement its demise.
Store curation was also an issue with tons of garbage in there that shouldn’t have been allowed.
On the other hand, it would have gotten a -7 rating on the ifixit scale. The hard drive got jostled one too many times and stopped working properly. I've fixed a lot of phones, but the Zune turned out to be unopenable, if that's even a word.
Actually, that's a lie. It did ultimately open, but the casing cracked repeatedly.
The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end budget phone or the top of the line model.
So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and placement of all menu items along the bottom of the screen with the extra items being hidden away in a drop-down using ellipsis. System wide light and dark themes jazzed up using an accent color that all of your apps respected.
The People hub (contacts app) was the central point for all social media. Facebook and Twitter were integrated. I didn't need fb messenger. Skype and fb messenger were integrated with the messaging app.
Damn, I wish we made it.
Amiga achieved quite a lot in terms of engineering for it's time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ
Any recommendations for self hosted XMPP stuff?
[0] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/managing-in...
A direct line from $random user to the on call is a recipe for disaster (ie your sres quitting) when you have many users. Engineers aren't first line tech support and those roles shouldn't be confused.
I fully understand what you're saying and mostly agree. Thoughts on having registered users of certain products having access (e.g. Domain purchasers, Google app admins [office? What is that product suite called these days?])?
Long live IRC
Although it didn't die yet, it certainly doesn't live up to its potential.
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.
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.
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.
Right before the shutdown I've booked a fight and hotel for a conference in June and it was showing as a big card in inbox. After the gmail switch there is nothing displayed, I have to go hunting for confirmation emails. So sad to see inbox go.
Using Spark for Android and it seems to be scratching the itch so far
Gmail seems slow and cluttered by comparison.
And other UX issues: seeing previews of images right in the email list, font/UI makes it harder to find things vs Inbox. Inbox was a much nicer UI/UX.
Ads are annoying but I would have been fine with ads if it was integrated in Inbox.
And look, I understand that it doesn’t make sense to invest in/maintain two heavily used email clients. But the most infuriating thing is the trip bundles. That was my most used feature and such a distinguishing aspect of Inbox that it’s almost insulting that Google would tell me I can “find my favorite features in Gmail” when it’s blatantly not there.
I would pay to still use Inbox.
Inbox: drag&drop a screenshot, then make it an attachment. Gmail: save it as an image in a folder, then select the attachments and browse to the file.
Back in Gmail I go to my flagged/starred emails and I know I’m supposed to do something about the email, but many times I’ve forgotten what what specific action was, so I open up the email, read through it and realize that I for some reason or other won’t take the action right now. Having to ”rediscover” actions in emails is such a waste of time. With Inbox there would be clear ToDos written, so I could easily scan a list of emails and pick the right one to take action on.
Also very useful with emails containing many actions within, but only one or a few are left unresolved, or an email with useful links for future reading, so easy to specify what in the email I should focus on and thus ignore the rest.
RIP Inbox. Miss you dearly.
The other option is to keep the next actions in a separate list (or app), with a link to the email. Then you face the problem of context switching between 2 apps, so yours is better.
I just with that I didn't have to open the email to see the note I'd written myself; Inbox was so clever that the reminder was right under the subject line.
Google mod chips some time they had them for the Playstation and XBox to use CDRs.
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.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/
Last.fm, well. I really miss it.
Windows Phone and especially the Metro Design (although some of it carried into Modern UI).
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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
Microsoft Encarta
This was replaced by Wikipedia for me, but I really enjoyed reading about stuff without any distraction (read: Internet access at home)
They have been an almost literal life saver for me in 2012-2013.
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://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/OS%2f2+NT
Also, Wikipedia "OS/2 NT" redirects to Windows NT.
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/ It'll cost you about $130 for a personal license, but if you want it, it's still there, and still supported.
(Still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port to be completed... https://www.vmssoftware.com/products_roadmap.html)
As we all know, transposing each initial by 1 from VMS gets you WNT. Rather like the HAL/IBM Space Odyssey factoid.
When yahoo killed off pipes I found 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.