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Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
278 points by mrborgen on April 6, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 636 comments
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.




Pebble 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.


> 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.


Everything needing to become a unicorn today is killing a ton of good products and services. It's apparently impossible to just be a successful small business for a few decades in the tech industry.


Indeed. You see it here a lot, someone will be sneering at a business with $10 million annual turnover and 20 staff and calling it a "lifestyle business", as if owning a double-digit percentage of such a business is not an excellent outcome by any sane standards.

Venture capital might be the only way to fund a moonshot-style startup but it seems to be the kiss of death for already-established, already-profitable businesses.


Moonshots would be cool if they were actually aiming at the Moon, not just churning out websites only incrementally different from other websites. I do wonder how much this churn contributes to the West not being able to do any actual moonshots.

Smartwatches are not "moonshots". They shouldn't be treated as such. They could be a component of one, though, and society would benefit from components being economically stable, instead of imploding after few years. Pebble was arguably the sanest smartwatch design out there - long battery life, power-efficient screens, hackable[0]. Because they suddenly wanted to get too big too fast, the world today does not have any smartwatch of comparable quality and utility.

--

[0] - not just in terms of writing watch faces; people did try to use them as medical devices[1], and they even had a protocol for attaching custom hardware that didn't go anywhere, but probably would if the company was still around

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5018102/


I still wear my Pebble every day and am not looking forward to the day when it conks out.

The thing that blows me away is no one has really swooped in to replace it. I got a Pebble because I wanted an always-on screen with high battery life (I charge mine roughly once every 5 days), and I have no idea where I'm going to find one when the time comes.


I'm still getting by with my Pebble Time Steel, and I've been watching (no pun intended) Fitbit's releases to see if they're yet up to snuff. It looks like the most recent revision of their smartwatches would work OK for me (and add HR sensor). Don't know if they'll be sufficiently reliable, since this has been a weak spot for Fitbit in years past.

If I'm able to eke out another 2-3 years, I might get an Apple Watch, which would presumably have 3-4 day battery life by then.


The versa is a good option, its the one that reminds me of the pebble the most.

Nothing has gotten to the size of my my pebble time round though


I have a Fitbit charge3 and I really like it. I have only had it for 6 months, so I can’t speak to it’s reliability.

The only thing I wish it had was an alarm that would wake me up at a specific level of sleep, like rem sleep.


I tried the charge3 and the step and stairs-climbed counters both read wildly incorrectly. It also had a tendency to track steps taken when driving. They also hadn't got the pulse-ox sensor doing anything at the time I returned it.

The OS on it is quite nice, the iOS app isn't bad either, but the inaccuracy just drove me nuts.

I moved on to a Garmin vivosmart instead. Not quite as pretty, but a lot more accurate.


Garmin watches have a week battery life and an always on display!


I second this. Garmin's wearables are excellent. My Instinct gets almost 2 weeks if battery life with approximately 30 minutes of GPS run tracking 5 days a week.


I've an amazfit bip; battery lasts about a month...


I second the Amazfit Bip. Mine lasts around 40 days per charge as a watch, heart rate, and step tracker. I leave notifications off.


Thirded. I get about a month between charges with everything turned on (notifications - the main purpose of the device for me, as well as heart rate monitoring, step and sleep tracking). Its no Pebble in terms of functionality or third party development, but I had Pebbles since the initial Kickstarter and while initially I installed every app I could find and tried to use it for anything and everything, eventually I worked out that (for me at least) it worked best as a extension of my phone display, not a replacement.


http://rebble.io/ seems relevant for you and other like-minded persons.


I've got the Suunto 9 smartwatch, it has always on display and battery usually lasts around 7 to 9 days.


Might want to stock up on used ones.


I use my Pebble Time Steel every day and will continue to use it until it dies. I tried a few different smartwatches and, for me, nothing comes close to the battery life, always-on display and hardware buttons combo.

For my purposes, it is a productivity boost to have calendar, slack etc. notifications and be able to mute everything by holding a button.


At the time there were no other options in the niche, and it fitted well with what some of us wanted: huge battery life, few features that worked well, lightweight, robust... cheap! Meanwhile Samsung, Garmin etc. went after Apple looking for features at the cost of everything else.

Today there is a myriad of competitors; when pebble.com went down, I bought one with 45 day battery life and otherwise the same features as a Pebble HR+ at the same price, plus GPS. There's third party apps for a few bucks.

I do miss the always-on display and its clarity, but not dealing with the slow and buggy software and lack of sync or ability to export the data. And I have more confidence in Xiaomi being around in a few years, not that it matters with Google Fit, MyFitnessPal and local CSV backups.


Maybe you'd be interested in http://rebble.io/


I like how their website logo shows the actual time.


This is a really sweet idea. A lot of the software looks like it hasn't been updated for over 6 months though.


I had a Kickstarter Edition pebble. It was terrible, both in hardware and software. After a few months it developed an issue when the contents of the display disappeared, and I had to physically press the display to see something (googling this it seemed I wasn't the only one with this problem). It also supported running only 1 watch app at a time, which meant if I had a timer running and I got an SMS which took focus, the timer stopped. I would have thought that running a timer on a watch would be basic functionality...


> I don't think the wearables market is really that valuable.

Hasn't the Apple Watch been outselling Rolex etc.?

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swi...


Rolex is a terrible example. On top of their products aiming to last generations (nobody's going to leave Apple Watch to their grandchildren), they're also well known for not reporting any sales figures what so ever.

Nobody can tell you how many Rolexes there are in total, let alone the sales figures of a specific model of a Rolex. That's partially what makes them so valuable. People usually don't change Rolexes every year when the new model is out.


Changing an Apple Watch/Android Wearable even once every 3-5 years must be the 7th circle of hell for someone like Dieter Rams.

It's incredible how normal it has become to switch out $500-$1200 products at such a cycle. Wasteful, next to no functional gain (certified electro-cardiography being exempt in my books), supporting narcissism...

It's consumerism to the max. We should all take a step back and think about what we are doing.


I too hate the cycle of replacing expensive things every few years for little to no gain.

But in the case of the Apple Watch, I think this replacement cycle is the same as most jewelry/fashion items.


You could (and are) say the same things about Fashion, since that's pretty much what the Apple Watch is: a fashion statement.


Rolex is a luxury brand, it's no surprise something else sells more. It's like being surprised BMW sells more than Bentley.


The watch market must be pretty small these days considering everyone has the time on their smartphone...

The only people I see wearing watches are business people who wear suits to work or work outdoors (people in the military). That's only a small percentage of people with a ~$100 product.


I see people of all kinds with Apple Watches all the time, some of them with the higher-end models. Even prompted a few conversations with strangers about the series, bands and faces.

I'd actually bet that phones will be supplanted by a combination of smartwatch + smartglasses in the future.

If you have ever detachedly watched a crowd of people holding out these slabs in their hands and craning their necks over them, you might agree that it looks rather archaic and is begging to be put out of fashion.


I see a lot of watches among 'fitness' people as well these days. I'd estimate that roughly half the people in my office wears a watch of some kind and non of them wears a suit to work.


Apple Watch revenue has surpassed the iPod, which was an absolute phenomenon. http://www.asymco.com/2017/11/08/when-watch-surpassed-ipod/

The cultural impact is undoubtedly lower.


My wife loves the crap out of her several Pebbles, and she didn't even get them until after the acquisition and shutdown plans were announced. She still gets speech-to-text thanks to rebble. If there were something comparable still being manufactured, I'm sure she would jump on it in a heartbeat.


I think their reliance on selling a device and not services as their source of income made them great, but also made them vulnerable.

If they sold additional services that weren't necessary for the watch to perfom, then maybe they'd have survived without depending on Kickstarter for funding.

I'm sad they're gone. There is nothing quite like it on the market.


If you miss the Pebble pick up a Fitbit Versa - it’s the same form factor, and the OS is the one Fitbit acquired from the Pebble fire sale. Unfortunately the display isn’t quite as good, but it definitely feels like a Pebble 3.


>Pebble smart-watches.

I'm still looking for a smartwatch that hits all the beats of Pebble.


I bought a Time Round on clearance just after they got bought out - £80. Fantastic little watch.


How are they dead? My wife uses hers all the time... And they're still for sale on Amazon?


The company was acquired and their watches are no longer manufactured or supported.


> Whilst I now would never buy a smartwatch

Why?


When my PTR died, I thought I'd really struggle without it. I used to evangelise the idea of it, claiming the convenience of on-wrist notifications, fitness tracking, my diary to hand (I have a very busy diary), etc..

I realised a couple of things once I lost it:

1. very few notifications need my urgent attention. In fact, I frequently have my notifications turned to "calls only" on my phone, and frequently leave it in another room on purpose so I don't have the temptation to look at it. A smartwatch would be thus a negative aspect of my life in this regard.

2. I don't need to track every aspect of my life, in fact that just generated more anxiety for me. I'm pretty fit, sleep soundly not enough (but tracking that never helped), eat very healthily, etc.. Tracking didn't help, it just added to the mental noise / anxiety (disclaimer: I don't suffer strongly from anxiety).

3. While I loved the PTR form-factor, I can't stand bulky watches (and really dislike cuboid watches). There just isn't a smartwatch with an aesthetic I'd consider wearing.


Google 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.


I 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.


It wasn't only marketing. Either the codebase was bad or the browsers at the time were not powerful enough for it. I remember using it for a uni project and after a few messages got into the history, it kept getting slower and slower. At some point it took seconds of lag between the key presses and the result.

As great as wave was, it didn't work very well either.


If it was written in Angular, that sounds about right.


If im not wrong it was developed using GWT.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

It was open sourced as Apache Wave. Yes, it was gwt.


Is Youtube written in Angular? I find myself having to refresh the page (Firefox is my default) to load the proper video fairly often; annoying UX.


Wave predates angular, but good attempt at a dig?


Yeah I'm not even sure that pitching it for business productivity would have been enough. The reasons it shines: chat, collaborative editing, blurred lines between documents, emails, and chat – those are built on concepts that didn't exist back then. We can see the value of it now precisely because we've had the intermediate stage of Slack/Docs/Gmail/etc. If that doesn't mean "ahead of its time" I don't know what does.


> 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.


because 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!


I used Wave for handling projects with a remote team and it was fantastic once you got used to it.

We began project specs in ‘instant messaging ‘ type mode, and then back and fleshed out that conversation, editing the original posts to become full fledged documents. It was seamless.

Browser performance was a dog, bug I’m sure that could have been worked on.

Loved the ecosystem of apps and bots that was developing


I'll be the contrarian here. I tried wave and was never really thrilled with it. Maybe I would have grown to like it, but I never really saw its place in my workflows. IMHO it didn't do any one thing great. It also didn't really play nice with other applications. It was more of an all-or-nothing experience.

I think if it really was so great others would have copied it and made great clones. Given that that never happened it would seem that others were never motivated enough to build a clone, which tells me that it was never useful enough.

I would be happy to be proven wrong about what a great tool it was, but in the end it seemed like more of a cool tech-demo than anything great.


I think Slack gets close to some of my favorite bits: the ability to go back and edit messages, spawn threads that go off on a tangent, the way it can link nicely to referenced docs and JIRAs, etc. I have mixed feelings about real-time typing. But it feels like Slack's generation of chat tools have picked up some of the ideas Wave pioneered without being all-or-nothing or not being primarily a chat tools.


Google Wave was late to the Groove party — that also failed:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks

Ray Ozzie’s Groove was remarkable for distributed teams in the mid-2000s; I’d argue not yet replicated.


This is the first response I've read that has any legitimacy to it.

They were way too early to market. Supposedly their compensation is or was structured to reward shipping new products/features to an extreme degree. I wonder how things might have turned out if they "shipped" it internally first, and iterated on it a few more times before putting it in the hands of the public.


I think, one of the biggest mistakes was that it wasn't backward compatible with email. Currently, there is an opportunity to fix was has gone wrong back then with Chat Over IMAP (COI). Maybe OX the driving company behind COI will realize what kind of an opportunity they have to extend COI from a simple chat extension to a full-featured email 2.0


I too am disappointed that Wave didn't catch on. My hopes were raised when it move to Apache, but alas, it's retired now: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html.


What it would take to built a similar product now? Ten years later, the tooling and ecosystem for such complicated SPAs is much better, so it should be at least a little bit less of an effort, right?


We've drawn inspirations from Google Wave with Taskade (https://taskade.com), would love to get your thoughts! You can reach me at john@taskade.com


Yea I would have assumed so - tbh this is still a massive problem I face in each new org I join. Documents/communications are scattered across google docs, notion, slack, jira.


Doesn't Notion try and solve this problem? What do you think Notion could do better to solve this issue?


Afaik several projects replicated what Wave did, since IIRC it was open-sourced. E.g. Rizzoma. Nothing came of them apparently.


Rizzoma looks interesting, thanks for sharing.

We are building a collaborative productivity tool at Taskade (https://taskade.com), in part inspired by Google Wave. Would love to get your thoughts!


Apache Wave can be self hosted on sandstorm at least.


XMPP. 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.


Xmpp 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.


You 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


While I agree with your pain points, I would not say XMPP that the protocol isn't any good.

- Pidgin: Just take a look at their bug tracker. You will not have any problems finding tickets requesting essential features which are 6 years and older (e.g. Message Archive Management). So unless the Pidgin devs get some done I would not use their client (Gajim is a much better alternative, especially since the 1.0 release last year).

- ejabberd OMEMO: Actually, I don't know what the ejabberd devs were thinking when they changed their default config to disable OMEMO. They told something about having a hard time tracking down issues with OMEMO enabled. Well, kinda makes sense from a developers perspective, but given the fact that OMEMO is end-to-end encryption, I wonder what they were expecting. Nevertheless, disabling OMEMO by default on the server is just a stupid idea.

- message delivery: I had problems with that too, but ultimately it was just a problem with some ejabberd setting (I think it was mod_stream_mgmt: resend_on_timeout: if_offline) [1].

[1] https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/#mod-stream-mgm...


From the user perspective, Pidgin is pretty much unmaintained at this point, so it's like complaining that old software isn't modern. Also, ejabberd doesn't disable OMEMO by default for quite a long time already.


And yet Pidgin is the go to client for people, especially on Windows.

When I got a MacOS machine up and running, I installed Adium (top result still if you go around looking for a MacOS XMPP client), also a dead project.

On Android, the top XMPP client does not support OMEMO and the new hotness XMPP client does not support OTP!

I have a legacy client on Android and Pidgin half hacked together with random plugins on my Windows boxes and I forget what in the world MacOS is running because I have it turned off half the time because the more clients I have connected the more problems I have and holy crap this is why Slack is a great product.

XMPP has had 20 years to solve these problems, and part of their problems of course is that the base protocol wasn't designed to solve these issues out of the box.

But, from the end user's perspective, Telegram, Signal, What's App, Slack, Discord, and Teams, all "just work"!


Actually, they still do (or do again?). Here comes the relevant part from their example config [1]:

    force_node_config:
      ## Change from "whitelist" to "open" to enable OMEMO support
      ## See https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/issues/2425
      "eu.siacs.conversations.axolotl.*":
        access_model: whitelist
[1] https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/blob/master/ejabberd....


Oh, my bad - it was the default config in Debian package that got changed. I assumed it originated from upstream, but I was wrong and it's actually patched by Debian maintainer:

http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/ejabberd/ejabberd_1... (debian/patches/ejabberd.yml.example.diff)


A large part about why there is a low availability of XMPP clients and why clients like Pidgin don't implement features for years is because of how verbose and, as OP said, much of a disaster it is.


> Xmpp 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.

What part of XMPP is doing that? I think you're talking about a bug in an implementation of XMPP not the protocol itself. Its like saying you go to an address and get the wrong website. Hard to blame an issue like that on HTTP rather than a server or a client that implements it.


> What part of XMPP is doing that? I think you're talking about a bug in an implementation of XMPP not the protocol itself. Its like saying you go to an address and get the wrong website. Hard to blame an issue like that on HTTP rather than a server or a client that implements it.

XMPP relies on clients having the Carbon Copy plugin installed.

Some clients have it installed, some clients do not.

If I have 3 devices connected to XMPP, which one gets a message sent to me is rather hard to determine. Often times it is the one I have most recently sent a message from, but other times it is not, and I will not get messages delivered to any of my other devices until I physically go home and log out of my desktop.


> I think you're talking about a bug in an implementation of XMPP not the protocol itself.

Is a protocol worth anything without an implementation?

Is a protocol good even if it only has poor implementations?


I've got no such issues, so those questions seem rhetorical to me.


I have prosody running on my Debian stable server, conversations on mobile/android and gajim on PC (Debian stable). Omemo works perfectly, no missed messages, no encryption problems. It just works. Different story a few years ago. The XMPP ecosystem improved a lot.


I'm hoping Matrix (matrix.org) will have more success.


Try it with no login in the browser, and any platform really, signup on their complimentary server takes literally 3 seconds.


Yeah, I've seen folks blog about how it's unfair that AWS profits from open-source software... WhatsApp took XMPP and walked away with $19bn without it helping the XMPP/Jabber ecosystem at all.


Wouldn’t that qualify as more of a technology than a product?


A new player has entered the game! https://www.coi-dev.org/


I love XMPP. I self-host a prosody server for a group of gopher and public access Linux server users. It's a niche market!


> I honestly think Im in contact with less people now because everyone dropped support for open protocols.

Same.

Well, it's not the only reason I'm in contact with less people now, but it's a major component.


> First Facebook disappeared behind it’s own walls, then google...

Google stopped XMPP compatibility before FB messenger did. I believe the latter still had an interface to the XMPP world up until 2015.


Chevy 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.


Love 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.


Idk that puts it too close to Prius territory for me. I’d expect the mileage to be a lot higher!


It really depends heavily on your driving habits. Mine had a lifetime mpg of 220, because I was able to do all of my commutes on the battery.


Kind of frustrating that GM killed the Cadillac version (ELR), citing poor sales and lack of a market for luxury hybrid/electric. I think the current number if luxury electric cars coming into the market disagrees. I'd be all over a volt if it had the slightest lean towards luxury or sport. The bolt is godforsaken ugly despite it's great numbers.

At $160/kWh for lithium batteries, it seems you could put a simple Atkinson cycle gas generator in the car for less than the extra 40kwh of batteries and yield better range and flexibility.

They also killed the CT6 plug-in hybrid after 1 year.

Seems they have too much brand debt to even bother putting out decent cars since nobody will bother trusting it.


I bought one. It had terrible battery that gave me less and less range on every charge. Resale value was non existent. Piece of garbage.


To 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.


maybe i just got a defective battery or something :D


There are still Prius Prime and Honda Clarity.


Notion 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi


IMHO, 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.


I 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.


ex-employee at notion ink. thank you for the love.


I have an OLPC laptop, and I still love that screen.


Steinberger 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


I 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.


I don't know whether this counts as `cool' or not (David Bowie's Tin Machine):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtOjC0NLFw


For 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.


While I like Bowie the guitar on that song sounds a bit nondescript. Maybe if there was a famous riff on one it would help.


Are they really gone? Still for sale in Europe: https://www.bax-shop.nl/elektrische-gitaren/steinberger-spir...


Strandberg guitars are similar in concept, maybe you'll find them interesting


OMG yes! Possibly the best design of anything of any kind ever.


As a guitarist that has a few traditional guitars.... I really want to add a headless guitar made out if modern materials (i e. not wood) to my lineup soon!


I feel the same way about Travis Bean guitars. You can't buy a good TB500, which was a truly great and functional guitar design, on the used market without paying a fortune.


The Electrical Guitar Company makes new aluminium-neck guitars, if that's something you're interested in. https://www.electricalguitarcompany.com/models/


I'd love to get a TB500 with the single coils and single volume and tone controls, but I don't think EGC makes them right now.


This is my grail guitar. I've been reaching out to random people for the last few years trying to acquire one. Not easy to find!


That's why I wish they'd start making them again. My interest in the TB500 has nothing to do with scarcity or collectibility—I think they're practical guitars for heavy usage. They seem almost unbreakable and they have a utilitarian quality.

I would snap this up in an instant, if I had $100K+ in discretionary money lying around: https://reverb.com/item/16339446-travis-bean-tb500-14-1976-w...


Ubuntu'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.


Yup unity was what spelled the end for the Ubuntu wave. I think this has been the single biggest mistake they made. I think it will take at least a decade again to bring the linux desktop to the masses.

Gnome 2 was perfect for people coming from windows moving over. Gnome 3 is like windows vista.

Me personally, I was really disappointed (of course you can install gnome 2 etc). But at the end of the day you just want something that works out of the box.


> bring the linux desktop to the masses

I am dumbfounded that people still see this happening at some point.


I saw a quote somewhere from Linus Torvalds that Chrome OS may end up being the future Linux desktop, once they finish polishing off their Linux app integration (Project Crostini). I'm able to actually get most of my work done now in that environment.


Was just about to post this. I was looking for my next laptop after I got so frustrated with the direction MacBook Pros we're heading, so I took the plunge and got the high end PixelBook.

I do all my development on it: VSCode, Postgres, docker, node, python, all works great. Importantly, the Crostini project is progressing rapidly and I get new functionality with each new ChromeOS release (e.g. shared files between Linux and ChromeOS, one-button container backup, etc.)


Ubuntu had traction already, they had a perfectly good thing then suddenly changed directions (unity + the phone desktop thing).

My analogy would be xp -> vista. Alienating core & target users.


> Gnome 3 is like windows vista.

What’s wrong with GNOME 3 or Vista? I’ve never had problems with either.


Why not try KDE? I am a long-time KDE user and very happy with it. The flexible Plasma desktop might give you what you are missing from unity. There seem to be some tutorials on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kde+unity+like


Theres even a page on the KDE wiki about making Plasma look and act like Unity: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/How_to_create_a_Unity-like_l...


Thank you! I'll give this a try.


Isn'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.


I ended up running kbuntu and was pleasantly surprised with it.


I love how I can switch workspaces, customize the desktop and do so much more with Unity (Unity Tweak Tool comes in handy). Had to roll back to 16.04 when I could do nothing of those on 18.04.

For the first time of me using Ubuntu (ver 18.04), I was disappointed in the fact that I had to re-learn some things and then get used to the new workflow when everything in 16.04 and Unity in particular was muscle memory.


Unity8 is still developed by the community [0] and there are ports under development for Arch, Debian, and Fedora too.

[0] Please see https://unity8.io/ and https://forums.ubports.com/category/36/unity8


I miss Unity too. Sometimes I catch myself with feeling to compile Unity8 from src. :)


https://github.com/ubports/unity8 ;)


Unity still has the smoothest 3x3 desktop experience ever made. It is also fantastic with touchscreen. I hope they will recover it some day..


I really don't get why they ditched unity since I didn't have the impression that it was (still) unpopular.


Thanks for bringing my attention to pop! Looks pretty cool.

Trying it out in a VM for now.


you only think you liked unity because now you despise gnome3.

the sooner you accept the gnome legacy is dead and move on to kde the better. I know it will be difficult, but it's inevitable.


MATE will still be here waiting patiently when you're ready.


This. I was hanging on to Ubuntu 16.04 until a month ago just to keep Unity. After finally upgrading to 18.04, I spent a week on Gnome 3 and it was quite a frustrating experience.

Found Ubuntu Mate and am loving it! MATE Tweak gives you so many options to make the UI work like Unity, even better in some ways. The only thing I missed were application shortcuts, but now the fancy dock works just as well for me.


kde was a meme and the red haired step child of linux even back in 2011 dude.


was.

nowadays it's pretty polished, fast and stable.


Google Inbox. And I don’t “find my favorite Inbox features in Gmail”. If you can’t tell I’m still bitter about it :(


Just 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.


Personally 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.


Bundles are like thematic inboxes. So I can go into work mode, family mode, news mode and stay there for a while but look only at things that have not been taken care of yet. If you try and replicate that with a filter, inbox actively prevents it (label: something AND in:inbox). It won't show anything. Even apple mail allows that. Also the de-emphasis of read/unread status. You can archive without reading more than the subject, and it doesn't show in all the unread counts etc. When unread counts are so much in your face, it's hard to ignore them.


Trip bundles, pinning, mail previews. Inbox was much cleaner than Gmail. Gmail also feels slower than Inbox - spinners on startup.

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.


Can you explain why it doesn't make sense to invest in two email clients? Particularly if you make one of the two premium?


Internal politics (Inbox was a clear threat to Gmail UI) and product adoption cannibalism


Apart from what’s already been mentioned (bundles, general UI, speed etc), the killer feature for me was how Reminders were integrated into the email itself. When an email came in that I couldn’t quickly resolve and move on, I’d write the short ToDo to myself about what I specifically need to do.

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.


Maybe you can add a Draft to the thread with a note to yourself about what the next action should be.


As a workaround, I kind of like that idea!

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.


For me, it was the way purchases and travel info were displayed.

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.


Same here: I was struggling to find the confirmation to show the hotel at the desk a few days ago while in Inbox it was immediately clear.


Besides bundles, the duplication of categories and labels hurts. Labels are second class (can't have a tab for instance) and categories are not user-generated. Lack of abstraction and orthogonality, a.k.a. "tacked on"


Not OP. My only issue with the Gmail app is the ads that sneak in.

Using Spark for Android and it seems to be scratching the itch so far


I miss snoozing emails right from notifications on Android a lot. With Gmail I need to open the app to snooze more than two hours.

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.


I miss the inbox UX & UI in particular.

Gmail seems slow and cluttered by comparison.


Also Google (reader/fiber/insert several dozen other cancelled Google programs)


Like 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.


It’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.


Email 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?


Mailbox suffered the same death after dropbox acquired it.


I am bitter as well. It is the first shutter by Google that was annoying for me. I wish they at least open sourced it.


While we're talking GOOG, I miss Reader :(


It is sad that Google just kill any product if it doesn't reach the size of 1 billion users.


anyone switched to an entirely different email provider as a result of this? have success, and which ones? starting to use gmail again and it's pretty annoying.


WebOS.

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.


So 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.


WebOS is the Snapcaht of operating systems (course Snapchat still lives, but doesn't get anywhere near the reward of all it pioneered).


>responsiveness

No, this one isn't true. Performance was one of the biggest problems of webOS. WebOS user forums were full of posts complaining about that. UI built with HTML and JavaScript rendered by Webkit1 was way too much for 2000s hardware to handle.


I was running WebOS on the HP TouchPad. And it was much more pleasant to use than Android on tablets at the time. I meant to the responsiveness from scrolling and swiping through pages.


The parent may mean that the design was responsive in the sense that its layout was dynamic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design


I've never heard someone refer to a website's "responsive" design as it's "responsiveness". That's almost always in regards to performance.


WebOS had so much potential. Unfortunately the performance was never there. There are still devices out there with WebOS powered interfaces, I believe LG borrowed bits and parts of it for pseudo smart TV/Projectors. Even the most recent ones, on hardware that should be more than capable, just don't feel responsive.

OTOH, maybe it wasn't that great. There's a lot of kiosks, car head units, set top boxes, etc out there just running extremely stripped down versions of linux or android, just for webkit. It's extremely popular in embedded circles when it comes time to put a ui on a touch screen. (for commercial products, not hobbyists)


I always felt that for a product called webOS, Palm had one of the worst mobile browsers. The big missing feature I remember was lack of support for downloadable fonts. I don't remember the Touchpad itself being particularly polished (although the corded charger itself is supposed to be very high quality). Some of the touch stuff was pretty slick (the rubber band effect in particular), but a lot of it was pretty infuriating for me to use.

The mobile OS I miss is the most is the last iteration of BlackBerry. Although Palm had the upper hand in developer/user relations, I think that BlackBerry really got the UX right.


I don't know if I want to value your opinion on browsers of the top feature for you is custom font download.

it was the mobile browser I could access more sites' content with at the time. even flash content, for better or worse! also I could download anything and open any local file, not just what apple allowed me.


I don't know if I want to value your opinion on browsers of the top feature for you is custom font download.

Not the top feature, but one of the most glaring. At the time I was working on a site that used TypeKit and the only platform I was using that TypeKit didn't support was webOS. The whole thing seemed quite odd as they essentially yanked out a working feature of WebKit when making the browser. Flash, OTOH, was something that didn't die soon enough. I'd've much rather seen support for actual standards than Flash, but HP made a bunch of odd decisions with webOS and the Touchpad. There's some pretty delicious irony in a platform with web in the name having a mediocre web browser.

I also had a bear of a time getting email and WiFi set up for whatever reason, I relegated my Touchpad to paperweight status pretty quickly though. Even basic UI things like scrolling and copy-and-paste just didn't work all that well. Here's a review I found that highlights the distinct lack of polish that webOS had.

https://shawnblanc.net/2011/07/hp-touchpad-review/

Overall I thought RIMM/BlackBerry did a much better job with BB10 than Palm/HP did with webOS.


https://www.webosnation.com/ Some how this still ambles along even though over a decade has passed since the Pre.


I 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.


Its the best "SmartTV" platform by far. The competition doesn't offer up much of a fight though.


Better than AndroidTV?

On my nexus player I was able to install Kodi, which I love for all the formats it supports. Roku doesn't support nearly as many formats.


I miss PalmOS, or more specifically the Graffiti text input system. I’d love to have it on the iPhone, and it would work much better on Apple Watch than its existing writing recognition.


Now you also have KaiOS which is similar to WebOS


Dieter Bohn is that you?


Nope.


Google 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.


"I still think RSS was a better way"

"I still think RSS is a better way", fixed that for you.


It 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.


Which is why providers all added those click through links. They write articles for ad money, and RSS readers don't get the ads.


Bazqux is a Google Reader clone that I've been using for 6 years now. It works amazingly well, has all the features I need from Google Reader, and doesn't change. One of the few SaaS I pay for.

https://bazqux.com

(No affiliation, just a big fan)


feedly.com is a decent replacement


Actually, I am working an RSS reader app with built-in discussions and Google Reader was a great inspiration for me. I still use RSS readers as a primary way of aggregating content. Leave your email if it'd like to be notified once I have a beta version: https://forms.gle/Xp47FqQXKwcJakSW8


Could you please share a link or few screenshots that could tell about what its UI looks like.


It's not yet ready to be shared in the form of screenshots. It will be a simple layout with the feeds list in a collapsible menu on the left-hand side and the list of posts on the right-hand side. When you navigate to post details, you will see the post content with media content if available. In addition to it, there will be a discussion section for each post. I'd like to have keyboard navigation in the app, and I don't plan to invest time in native apps. Instead, I'd like to utilize PWA features to make the web app easy to use on mobiles too.


Google Reader was a success in that it dominated its niche for many years.


Have you checked ContentStudio.io

Gives you an option to curate the content or follow with rich query builder.


ContentStudio.io is a great option for content curation with different levels of customization.


Grooveshark - one of the first/greatest music streaming services around.

Comprehensive music catalogue, servers never went down, and UI was simplicity incarnate.

Totally illegal business model, so it's not surprising that it didn't survive.

But it was awesome while it lasted.


> Totally illegal business model

It was no different to YouTube’s...


Are you referring to VEVO? Because VEVO is entirely legal


No, 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.


VEVO isn’t all music on Youtube


The 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.


You can still access it by opening the Google app and tapping on "Updates".


Thanks!


Also, 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.


Good to know! What a strange little icon... (Oh, I guess it's like a physical inbox tray?)


BeOS, a modern operating system that supported SMP, preemptive multitasking, and a journaling file system waaaaay before Windows 95 was even released.


BeOS was indeed great, but its first version was released a few months after Win95.


The release was after Windows 95, but I thought they had those modern OS features already working long before that?


Well, 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".


So 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).


You 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 :)


Check out Haiku OS: https://www.haiku-os.org/


Killed by MS anticompetitive practices


Rdio. Music Streaming service. Not sure what happened after they closed up shop but the UI was beautiful and they had great performance.


Venture backed, took a big bet on Vdio that the market didn't care for, probably couldn't meet growth goals compared to their burn.


Failing cause of taking vc money seems to be a recurring theme..


Why I'm bootstrapping my new startup


After Rdio was cancelled, I never bothered to sign up for another streaming service. I, too, miss their beautiful UI.


The interface got rolled into Pandora Premium after they were acquired.


Whyd, an audio platform for unfindable records.

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.


I 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.


I 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.


Something 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.


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.


Random 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.


I 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.


It'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?


I don't run an assembly line myself - we use them for gaze tracking in sport science.

Mostly in industrial use they are used to identify parts quickly with AR overlays.


What I specifically remember about Google Glass is endless reports of people getting assaulted for wearing them because people were thought they were being recorded.


Google Glass is actively produced and successful in the enterprise space. The consumer market wasn't the ideal demographic, but it pivoted and continued development.


Wearing 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.


Have you seen Focals? They seem to be a spiritual successor to glass, though focused more on the form factor (looking like a normal pair of glasses) than matching all the features glass had (as part of the Google ecosystem). North only has a few stores so not many people have actually tried them out.


I think down the line we'll see wireless Google Lens, as in contact lense(s), that provide all kinds of information to the wearer, unbeknownst to all others. Maybe power will be generated by harnessing eyeball movement. Maybe a see-through camera. Maybe...


> I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular

Nobody could make it popular after that infamous shower photo. Products need certain coolness to gain traction and Scoble made it go the other way (I live in non-English speaking country and I use that shot to explain the word "nerd").


Basic problem with Google Glass:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14


I think the combination of the actually-not-that-discreet camcorder and the fact it didn't really have a reputation for being able to do much else interesting at launch was the perfect storm

I'm not really that bothered by people holding phones in a way that might be surreptitiously recording me, because I expect they're actually using them for something else.


StumbleUpon.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.


I came in here to say this. Ctrl+f "StumbleUpon". Probably one of my favorite ideas. Was sad to see it go.


I know it's not the same, but using the "related" feature in Google can be very effective. example: "related:news.ycombinator.com"


Sega Dreamcast. All Sony had to say was "PS2 is coming next year" and everyone stopped listening to what they could get today.


Even if they hadn’t, the PS2 is one of the greatest consoles of all time. It would have been a difficult competitor to go against.


It could have held it's own technologically, except that SEGA were complete dumbshits and their console supported burned CDRs out of the box. That was a coup de grace.


It may not have helped, but let's not call people complete dumbshits for leaving a loophole in their DRM. That was a mistake that could happen to anyone, and the outcome was decided by then anyway.

Now botching the Saturn launch because of political infighting between the Japanese and American branches of the company? If you're going to call them complete dumbshits for anything, that's what I would pick.


Do you have a link where I could read about that?


https://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-Generat...


Thanks!


I 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.


You 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.


Sony tried to do the same in 2005 when Microsoft released the XBox 360, only they kept pushing back the release date. Thankfully their E3 2006 press conference was such a flop that in a bit of karmic justice it forced them to stop resting on their laurels and compete for marketshare again.


There was precedent. Sony destroyed the SEGA Saturn's USA launch by simply walking up to the microphone at E3 in 1995 by saying just one word: $299.


Saturn's launch was destroyed by a sudden release with too few retailers onboard. E3 was just a byproduct of that.


Agreed. Although the PS2 was fantastic in its own right, the Dreamcast was way ahead of its time (especially with network connectivity) and wasn't given a fair shake.


Dreamcast was developed and released far too early to stand a chance.


PS 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.


> 3DS didn't do too well either as compared to DS.

It sold about half as many, but it still did very well. It's the 11th best selling video game system of all time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...


> I don't think we'll see a dedicated handheld gaming device any time soon.

What about the Nintendo Switch?


It 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).


It’s not a dedicated, it’s a hybrid.


It 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.


I 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.


I 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.


The 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!


From 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.


That'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.


Nvidia 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/wa...


Nvidia already has a product for game streaming that you can use today though!


What 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.


The ability to pull out your smartcard, have the desktop go away, then plug your smartcard in somewhere else and have your desktop come back was pretty impressive.


Indeed. When we got them for the lab I was working in, this was a feature that blew my mind.

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.


Google 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”


I would argue that GTalk is not still alive. They sneakily replaced it with Hangouts, which brought multi-way video, but was otherwise worse in every way.


Plus Google Talk was XMPP compatible for a long time.


I 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.


Agreed, 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.


I'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.


Google'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.


And the Nexus 5 phone. Lightweight, durable plastic body, good hardware, not ridiculously large... I still havent seen a spiritual successor


We had 3 different Nexus 5X phones die via a bootloop. All bought from different vendors.

100% death rate.

And yes, I know there was a "fix" released last year. Didn't work for any of them.

Great cheap phones other than that. Really good cameras on them.


I went through 2 Nexus 5x's. Even when they weren't being bricked, they were laggy as hell. I'd constantly be waiting 5 seconds for actions to register.


I went from the Nexus 5 to Nexus 5x to pixel 1. They all feel like a newer version of the previous to me.


I moved from the Nexus 5 to the Motorola G series of phones. Cheap but not too fast.


I 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.


I have the first gen, which was sadly made unusable due to flash write speeds.


Somehow 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.


Neo 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.


I 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.


Nokia N9 and its OS: Meego. Imho this was in so many aspects "UX just done right".


Everything 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-...


Killed 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)


I had N900. Loved that little linux phone.


Wasn'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.


It was rebranded to PixelSense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense), giving its name to the Surface we know of today.


We had one. It wasn't "great" the touch screen had too much latency. I think it was around $8K.


Android 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.


Check out the fxtec pro1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/slider-phone-reborn-fxtec-pro1...


That looks amazing... will be interesting to see if it actually releases though.


The 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.


Blackberry still makes Android phones with keyboards.


BlackBerry is still around?


I had a Samsung Galaxy Chat. Miss that thing, it was awesome.


This. I really miss my HTC Dream and Desire Z.


Nokia linux tablets/phones n800x series and their Maemo OS


I’m so bitter the N9 got canned.


Maemo was great. I still have an N770 and N810 kicking around.


I 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.


you 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.


Software too. The Nokia-made apps on the 920 were all extremely polished and worked perfectly with the rest of the phone.


The 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.


You might want to actually look at the sales figures for the Atari 800. Atari and Commodore were outselling Apple in their day. Commodore did indeed outsell Atari, but Atari wasn't a failure.


Atari ST was another computer that failed. It used a DRI CP/M-68 and GEM with TOS with MS-DOS formatted disks. The Amiga outsold it, but the ST had the Magic Sac to run Mac programs as well.


Atari 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.


The ST didn't use CP/M-68K (it did during early development, but pivoted to a newly written file system and loader before it shipped).

The ST failed because the Tramiels didn't really understand software platforms. They got hardware, but when it came to developing an ecosystem that could support developers over a long period of time they just couldn't compete with the likes of Apple and Microsoft (the ST's software team was 10-12 people, and I don't care how good they were, doing a long-term successful platform just wasn't going to happen with a team that small). Coupled with some predatory business practices, the writing was on the wall.

The Magic Sac was more of a curiosity than it was a serious solution to anything. I have a great deal of respect for David Small, but the product was never going to work for the 68020 and up Macs.


Now that's a good question. The Atari 8-bit FAQ says 'Atari had sold 35,000 400/800 computers through 1980' and since it was obviously put together by Atari enthusiasts I wouldn't expect it to shoot low on the estimate. But elsewhere, a figure nearly an order of magnitude higher has been suggested, which would indeed have outsold Apple. Which figure is correct?


Well, the Atari 8-bit FAQ is just off by a magnitude. http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/siti/total_share.html is ok and well sourced but they do skip some models from Atari and Commodore.


Yahoo Pipes was an excellent tool for mashing up RSS feeds.


I 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 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.


Wow, I’m surprised there’s nothing about the Lisp Machines/Smalltalk... Remember ‘Worse is Better’?

And there is Xanadu, the ultimate hypermedia system. It’s a pity that no one (who could fund them) really understood the concept back then and it became vaporware...


Autodesk did understand the concept and fund them for a while. There are two reasons this conversation is not taking place via Xanadu:

1. The brilliant visionary wasn't also a skilled project manager, which is understandable enough, but unfortunately he didn't recognize the issue in time to take steps to either learn the relevant skills or delegate to someone who possessed them.

2. No viable intermediate steps. Version 1.0 insisted on being the whole shebang. They didn't manage to identify an MVP that would've been easier to build while still useful. Berners-Lee, by contrast, did identify such an MVP.


minidisc 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.


Reading 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.


I 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.


If 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).


It 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


Minidiscs were only popular in Japan. They had limited success everywhere else.


As someone who was living in the UK during the "minidisc era", I can confirm that this is extremely not true. Everyone I knew had a minidisc player, and they were ubiquitous while commuting on the tube.

I think the "it was only a success in Japan" meme is one of those things that people read on the internet and just assume is true because it sounds plausible. In reality they were very popular across Europe, wide parts of Asia, and Australia/NZ (to perhaps a slightly lesser extent) as well.

Anyway the YouTube video above covers all this better than I can.


It was popular in many parts of Asia and Western Europe.


I agree with you. I was a huge fan of Minidisc, and even had an MD-related business in the early 2000s. However, as others have said, it was really only (relatively) unsuccessful in the US. It was hugely successful in Japan, and only faded out as the iPod made it obsolete for music listening, and (slightly later) flash recorders took over the market for field recording.

In Japan, you can still buy blank minidiscs in any normal electronics store.


I had an MD player when the first iPod came out. A friend got one and I noticed how bad it sounded. So we compared the same track at the same bitrate with the same headphones. The quality on the iPod was much worse. But it did look cool and they had iTunes.


I 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.


turntable.fm was super fun! wish they had something like this now.


Yes! 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.


I 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.


I 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.


plug.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://www.producthunt.com/posts/roadtrip-3


Good old time.

I made ttdashboard.com which was a live statistics dashboard for turntable.


jqbx.fm is a great alternative. Not a ton of users yet, but it's a neat product built on-top of Spotify.


Palm/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.


Agreed, WebOS was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. And I agree about the Pre, I loved that thing.


The Pre (or HP 3) with the Blackberry Passport keyboard would be an amazing thing to have these days.


Gtalk - the very lightweight IM

+1 XMPP - in still finding it puzzling that it's not deployed and used more often


When google killed desktop gtalk client, it left a void in my life for years that only recently telegram could fill.


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.


The 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.


Aereo 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.


To 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.


iPod 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.


The replacement is more likely the Apple Watch and wireless head / earphones.


Good 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.


That 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


Much more expensive in comparison.


Oculus 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.


It's because most people are only associating it with gaming. And media outlets measure its success by checking if it is capturing the gaming market. But VR has applications beyond that.

I mean, there is a new art form that let you paint in mid air. How are artists not all over this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW49IKs1kE

A technology doesn't have to be something you spend time with everyday to be successful.


There's a huge barrier to entry for any of the possible applications that most people just don't want to risk. For art, it costs $10 to download photoshop, but it costs an average person $500+ (computer hardware and headset) to get into VR. There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.

I'm only seeing good things about VR gaming, though. It's definitely becoming more popular there. Lots of people seem excited for the Steam Index.


> There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.

I would say Goro Fujita is a well-known artist for his illustration work and he's now doing almost only VR pieces. https://www.instagram.com/goro.fujita/


What a weird thing to say a couple of months before the release of oculus quest and valve index


One of the founders is a neighbor.. $20m later. They lucked out with FB/Zuck frothing over their company so early.


I 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).


Luck only in the sense of how early they were as a company and the premium Facebook put on them.


I 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.


I really wouldn't say that VR failed. The market seems to still be consistently growing, if slowly, and people who use it generally seem satisfied.

FWIW I was really skeptical about VR at the peak of the hype but now I'm waiting on a good opportunity to buy a headset myself.


Mozilla Persona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona


Oh 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


Segway. 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).


I 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.


The Segway was predicted to become what the electric scooter has instead.


An ironic twist that the company that bought the Segway brand makes nearly every one of those scooters. I guess it sort of worked out after all?


Price point matters.


And 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.


Well Segway itself may not have succeeded, but I see more and more people roaming the city on self-balancing scooters.


Usenet, IRC, RSS, XMPP, ... Well, still rockin'


Fun fact, Google uses IRC as a communication channel for incidents[0]. IRC is stable, simple to host and connect to, and easy to log. So all of Google could be on fire, but the incident responders have a simple tool to use to communicate that likely won't die.

[0] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/managing-in...


Is this something folks outside Google can access to get a human being in Google?


Lord no. In what universe would it make sense to let random people spam a channel you're using to coordinate an emergency response.


Intake/ingestion.


Avenues for that already exist. But the signal from those kinds of things is so so low compared to the noise that you often need multiple layers of moderation and filtering before anything useful.

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.


Of course. And my thinking when posting my first comment was the cliche critique that Google has no human tech support. I wrote it a bit tongue in cheek after trying to get a human at another tech firm for several weeks now.

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?])?


Outsiders would be -v devoiced.


Then this doesn't solve GPs problem (being able to communicate with insiders) and leaves the problem of needing to worry about all communication being public. That means people's names, commands, tools, architecture, etc. Which is certainly something I'd be curious about, but there's no good reason to take those risks.


The 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.


Osu! 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.


Not a game but twitch chat is basically IRC. You can indeed login with irssi if you wanted to.


As a person who has to use Slack (and its walled garde) every day at work, I miss the simplicity of IRC. I think it probably lost out due to stagnation when it came to features and ease of use for the technically non-inclined. But at least it was (and is) completely open.


Really enjoying TheLounge for IRC lately. FreshRSS as well.

Any recommendations for self hosted XMPP stuff?


Prosody. I self-host for a small group of friends. Setup is well documented and easy.


I 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.)


Microsoft Courier. A dual-screen tablet that was basically OneNote in hardware form.


That 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.


This actually never existed. It was vaporware. A good video showing what something should be, not what it actually was.


Swype.

It disappeared from my phone this week and I'm in shambles.


Isn't this integrated in all modern keyboards?

At least Google keyboard does it now!


Swiping 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.


Multiple languages with Google Swype is indeed awful.


If 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.


What 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?


It'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.


If it's gboard, you might have to enable it in settings.


Gboard is pretty weak in comparison. Much worse spelling and its custom dictionary may or may not work, I have no idea.


Along the same lines is Fleksy. They had a completely unique approach to typing.

It was abandoned and later bought out by Pintrest.


Man, I was just this week thinking about reinstalling it. It's the only phone software I've ever bought. They took some features away a couple years ago so I uninstalled it in a snit, but I've been using gboard for gestural spelling and it's just crap. Over 50% needs respelling and/or returns nonsuggestions.


That’s too bad, years ago I switched from Android to iPhone and the only thing I missed was Swype. I still miss it. Later Swype became available on iOS but it was never as good as the Android one.

If it’s gone that’s one less reason to switch back to Android.


Was Swype really that good?

http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/text-what-i-mean-not-what-i...


Firefox 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. :(


Check out 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


Check out https://www.kaiostech.com/ , it's a fork of Firefox OS for feature phones.


last.fm

Although it didn't die yet, it certainly doesn't live up to its potential.


As 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.


I 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?


No, 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.


It 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.


Yeah, 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.


As an avid scrobbler I'd say their problem was they couldn't get their focus straight. The real power of the service is the data, the stats of the users. Instead of focusing on hardcore users who try to scrobble everything they listen to, last.fm tried to force the unnecessary streaming as a way to grow user base, at the same time limiting and not developing data analysis, social parts of the service ("neighbours"), closing groups, etc., alienating many along the way.


Parse (although it lives on as open source and other providers, see. https://buddy.com/blog/parse-buddy-forever-free-full-feature... for example)

Microsoft's WPF


WPF is horrible architecture. It's most important purpose is a to serve as case study in how not to design software.


I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks that. Creating a WPF application feels like wading through treacle to me.

I remember the delight I had when I started using VB4, the immediacy and productivity. WPF is the polar opposite to that.


How does firebase compare to what parse was?

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.


At least when I was using it a few years ago, I found Parse to be more intuitive and polished. Their DB browser and filter/query tools were terrific, and a great deal of the platform was (eventually) open-sourced.


WPF hasn't succeeded? What am I missing?


WPF 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.


WPF 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.


I 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.


No, Eclipse. Just think about how many "enterprise grade" applications are built on Eclipse.

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.


"I suspect the actual standard on Windows today, as hated as it is here on HN, is now Electron."

You may be right :-)


Yes with VSCode being the poster child of that movement (I.e. towards web tech for desktop apps)


WPF evolved into XAML. WPF is considered stable and feature complete.

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


Windows Phone

Zune


The Zune (media players) and Windows Phone (upto 8, not even 8.1). The fluid interface with focus on readability and content.

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.


The UI/UX design on the Zune HD is one of the best I've ever used on a handheld device. I also loved the contextual information that would be loaded on to the device for each artist. There'd be a short bio with links to different artists that were strong influences, and you could journey down a rabbit hole of discovery. The hardware was also extremely satisfying for the time. I think it was the first oled screen I ever laid eyes on, and I was a big fan of the sharp angled metal body. The only thing I wasn't a fan of was the volume controls that couldn't be easily controlled while the device was inside your pocket. But other than that, the zune hd as a whole is one of the few pieces of tech that I felt joy interacting with every time I picked it up.


I still don't understand how MS managed to mess up Windows Phone. My girlfriend had one for a while and it was excellent.


Google's monopolistic abuse is a very under-reported part of this story.

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.


I commented something like this last time I saw this sentiment on HN.

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.


You likely have commented that multiple times, since it seems like a copy/paste to a completely different discussion. It isn't relevant here.

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.


You missed that they had Google apps, then MS threw out the platform and replaced it with something non-competitive and very confused about what an app was or could be.

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 apps that MS made for third parties were rush jobs and poorly maintained over time

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.


Windows Phone 7 didn’t come out until late 2010. Then WP8 required new hardware. By the time they could have built any kind of momentum Apple and Google were eons ahead of them.

iPhone 4 was released before WP7.

It’s a shame, my WP8 phone is still my favorite smart phone ever.


They reset the ecosystem multiple times and required developers to rebuild/rewrite their apps each time. Not a smart move when you don’t have many apps to begin with.

Store curation was also an issue with tons of garbage in there that shouldn’t have been allowed.


No official apps, and the store was full of crapware. Microsoft should have curated their app store it until it got some traction.


there were a lot of problems. One that hasn't been mentioned is that MS's idea of Windows Phone was that all the apps would match the OS's design. A lot of big companies did not want to do that.


As a user I have to say I did want that. Windows Phone peaked with WP8 though, IMHO. W10M has always been weirdly buggy, inconsistent and not performing as well.

I guess the two API and forced hardware changes did most to cement its demise.


One simple reason: No support for OpenGL ES.


I had a Zune 120 and I still miss it. What a great, simple player.

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.


I’m a Linux die hard fan, but the Windows Phone was indeed a great product. I liked mine!


Never owned one, but interested about what made it great?


Here 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.


I had one. I think the interface was great. The OS was buttery smooth. Can't really remember the details but I really liked it.


Ah cool. Btw, my question was not sarcastic - just genuine curiosity.


Great user experience overall. Very fast and everything seemed tightly integrated.


Flat/Metro UI, live tiles, jump lists, dark mode. (I'm still using mine as a daily driver)


Zune was ahead of its time


Gowalla.

Using geographical location to find digital items way before Ingress and Pokemon Go. The design was gorgeous too.


Geomon 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...


Commodore Amiga? It took several years for the PC world to have a similar capable standard machine?


Its 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


The Amiga.


I 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.


Relevant and incredibly high quality video on the languishing of the Amiga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ


Amie.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.


The 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.


OS/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


Switch 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.


Do you mean these: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Light-Bulbs-LED-Bulbs/S... ?


Yes, those are the ones. (out of stock everywhere, company shut down, in case it isn't noticed)


Plan 9


Some 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.


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.


Visual Basic 6


haha. 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.


Yes a good point. I think when VB 6 disappeared then so did a good drag and drop component market place too


+ Fist bump. One day I will have something as good as VB6's IDE. Right?


Yep. 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


Beta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war


Drop.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).


Last.fm is still around! Although I guess you could say they didn't succeed, per se.


Ringly. 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.


Google Inbox The ONLY email client I was satisfied with.


Newton MessagePad 2000 and 2100


Not 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) 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.


The 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


FirefoxOS


WebOS


I'll hopelessly upvote and/or comment any positive mentions of WebOS. I still miss the Palm Pre.


I 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.


It's on my LG TV, and it's great


Excluding 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.


With respect to Windows phone, I only heard good things about the UX from users. I heard many complaints about the lack of apps though.


The 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.


How 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.


IMHO 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.


To what "Unity" are you referring?


Magic Cap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap


Light Table


Light Table has a new maintainer, so Miracle Max might yet be able to help.

http://lighttable.com/2019/03/31/New-year-old-plans/


While 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.


I 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-ge...


I believe CTRL-Labs took over that goal and is actively pursuing it: https://www.ctrl-labs.com/


Prismatic (used to be at 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 :-(


iirc 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 :)


Angular 1.

I must admit, Angular 1 is productive to me. But its custom directive failed so much for a composition model.

It's a pity, though.


I feel like VueJs is a worthy successor, no?


I 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.


Path. 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.


Wait, 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-you...


Hypercard


LiveCode, which contains a superset of Hypercard's functionality, is still going strong, as far as I could tell.


OS/2


Anecdote: OS/2 ISV was responsible for bringing the Start button back to Windows.


Well OS/2 v3.0 became Windows NT so sort of succeeded, just not for IBM or in name (unless you count cash registers).


That'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/ It'll cost you about $130 for a personal license, but if you want it, it's still there, and still supported.


Dave Cutler (one of the designers of VMS at DEC) led the development of WNT at MS. While some ideas may have trickled down, WNT isn't "based" on VMS. If it was, it would be a lot better :D

(Still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port to be completed... https://www.vmssoftware.com/products_roadmap.html)


Correct in the official sense, and it fits the EEE mantra to a T.

As we all know, transposing each initial by 1 from VMS gets you WNT. Rather like the HAL/IBM Space Odyssey factoid.


Spiritually maybe. The lineage between the two isn't official.


Windows 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.


True. I was working with OS/2 pre-releases at the time.

https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/OS%2f2+NT

Also, Wikipedia "OS/2 NT" redirects to Windows NT.


Google Reader

Google Wave


Losing reader essentially killed RSS feeds for me. I tried importing my lists into other apps but it became a hassle


Give feedly another try. I've been using it ever since Reader got killed.


Years later, I'm still in love with Google Wave.


The 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/


Apple A/UX

IMHO the final Apple product released before they turned intolerably smug.


Apple 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.


I 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.


Huh, I’ve never heard of it before now. Unix based but with system 7’s UI sounds very appealing.


Jawbone 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.


Friendfeed? [1] It was a great social media aggregator.

Groove Networks [2] a serverless team app.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

[2] http://www2.sys-con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/...


dotCloud 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...


Docker only exists because it was developed at dotcloud. I'm quite happy with Docker, and certainly wouldn't trade it to have dotcloud back.


But there are other PAAS that are great and successful, e.g. Firebase


Lotus Improv

Google Inbox

SGI workstations

Sun NeWS


Firewire, 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


Yeah... I agree. It took 20 years for the FireWire to be widespread enough for companies started to make products for them (Thunderbolt 3).


SmallTalk could have been used by Sun instead of Java.


Stumbleupon

Tastekid


C-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.


The 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/


BeOS 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/


Everpix 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.


Google Reader :-(


The 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.


an alternative to common spreadsheet software, which I mentioned before at [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290728


Google wave, definitely. I still haven’t found an alternative that suits me.


RethinkDB


Riak


Nokia 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.


I understand the sentiment, but the Nokia 3310 was a giant success. Over 100 million units sold.


I 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.


You 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/

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18823871

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361168


Thank you


I think systemd is a bad thing but I also don't think pre-systemd init systems were a "good product".


How many of them do you know well? Indeed, how many of them do you know?


TwitFog - 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.


You 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.


Detour. 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.


OpenDoc

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc


Amiga: born a champion, but Commodore fucked it up.


IBM 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.


Chumpy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby


Betamax


JavaFX

Silverlight

Adobe AIR


This 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.


Conceptually 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.


About 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.


Not 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.


Yes. 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!


HIPSTER ELECTRON


Hear One earbuds. Fantastic sounding, weighed only 14g and the noise canceling and filtering really, really worked.


OS/2 warp. A great operating system.


Microsoft Zune


XUL/XPCOM

(Someone else already said Google Wave.)


Aeroscope. 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-wireles...


My love life ... of course I might have a career as a comedian if my wife does not see this.


Unpopular opinion: Windows Phone?


If it had come out in 2008 instead of 2010, it would have dominated.


WinAmp

ICQ


You 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/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_5.8


Winamp 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.


WINAMP! It really whips the llama's ass.


rapbits. music sharing app on imessage that was dope https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4


I'm sure many, many games didn't, due to market visability.


Changetip was neat but got acquihired and shut down


Canonical Bazaar

Microsoft Encarta


> 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


> Microsoft Encarta

This was replaced by Wikipedia for me, but I really enjoyed reading about stuff without any distraction (read: Internet access at home)


You 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.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax


The Commodore Amiga.

Excuse me while I go reminisce....


VRML & Chromeffects - too early.


...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'.


Nokia N9 + Meego/Maemo devices.


Inbox by Google.

SIGH.


Multics


This would be based upon the myth that Multics failed, yes?

* https://multicians.org/myths.html


Multics, 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.


And two systems to the NSA.


I read the page. I think on any terms we understand the net final outcome is pretty betamax


Visual Basic Classic (VB6)


I loved this and think the next Mass market IDE could be like VB6


Toshiba Libretto


Microsoft Zune.


Priceline Gas.


Going outside


Google Wave


BeOS.


BeOS


V2


Tivo AOL


NeXT.


How 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.


A "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.


Yes good point. Many people forget that all Apple stuff is really NeXT


Zeo


www.airwavemini.com


The promise of a decentralised internet where the distinction between producer and consumer is entirely up to the person at the keyboard.


NAT killed this dream.


Having to buy static IPs rather than just getting one with your internet subscription.


I wish there had been stronger pushback legislatively for these two (and other) attributes of ISPs.


And the "A" in ADSL.


There's still hope in this front


technically 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.


More relevantly its also largely out of the power of citizens to make the transition. Especially in the US where you often have no choice in ISP, if they don't provide static IPv6 addresses theres nothing you can do.


Like he said though, you can have an overlay network on top of what any ISP gives you. Like Tor does with onion services, Ethereum, DHTs, IPFS, etc. You can make peer-to-peer connections regardless of whether or not you're NAT'd. Of course this technology is still not very popular, but it's possible.


all you need is someone to broker a tunnel for you. i'm assuming both that such a broker would be an easily managed cost and it that would be relatively cheap and easy to be assigned global blocks.


Technically it is doable, what it lacking is the demand. It is this lack of demand which I deem to be the biggest problem, the fact that the average net user does not realise - or does not care - that they essentially have being herded into a panopticon where the guards are selling tickets for the show to the highest bidder. Attempts to explain this nearly always are met with indifference or hostility. The indifference is the biggest problem here given that I suspect the hostility comes from people who are in denial and as such at least are partly aware of their role in the herd.


Other decentralized techs had promise but were later re-centralized (FM radio is the first example that comes to mind). It seems to me techies think that the natural tendency to monopolies in the capitalistic economy can be countered by distributed protocols, and I think the evidence is against that. FM radio -> clear channel. TCP/IP -> NAT. SMTP/IMAP -> gmail, outlook, yahoo. http -> web giants. XMPP -> Facebook messenger. The idea that monopolies are obsolete by the time they form is preposterous. Recommended reading: "The curse of bigness" Tim Wu.


Nokia's maemo phones were great, both of them.


BlackBerry.

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.


The old Skype.


It wasn't successful?


Well, it died and gave way to some other abomination.


Skype was never good


[flagged]


You may want to re-read the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


[flagged]


Not necessarily. I also had a Kickstarter Edition Pebble and I have similar sentiments...


Tesla


Too soon. :-)




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