

Ask HN: Why do I always see “X has shut down”, but have never heard of X? - DiabloD3

Over the past 2 years I&#x27;ve seen maybe a hundred &quot;X has shut down&quot; postings, but many of them I have never heard of, and some of them looked like a company I would have liked to have done business with.<p>So, what gives? Do companies just not advertise themselves enough?
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svisser
They failed to reach you and that's part of the reason why they shut down.

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casion
For a lot of the companies I see, it's not that they don't advertise enough...
It's that they're selling a solution to a problem that nobody is rushing to
solve.

Other factors come in of course, such as: bad advertising, bad product, poor
social media representation, bad SEO, bad service, bad management, bad
whatever.

From my perspective though, I just see lots of companies selling solutions to
problems I never thought of looking for a solution to. It takes some really,
really good advertising and a good product to overtake that burden.

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Yenrabbit
Based on the title I arrived here to explain how the X display server works :P

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moioci
For the simple reason that the more successful a company is, the more likely
you are to have heard of them. These are the companies that never gained
traction.

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wcchandler
It'd be nice if there was a "Startup Portfolio" that's linked on HN which is
basically a long list of startups that have been endorsed or blessed or backed
by HN founders, supporters or alum. Each company could get 1 paragraph to
describe their company and their current objectives. Might be interesting to
just browse the list on occasion.

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DiabloD3
That would be nice. And maybe companies owned by high karma count HN users
(cough cough)

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bbcbasic
There are also lots of multi million or multi billion dollar successful
businesses that you have never heard of.

I think it is more about your bandwidth as a mere mortal. Even with the number
of advertising messages laid on us per day, there is no way we can know about
every business that may be relevant to us. There is only so many Kb/s that can
enter our brains!

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umeboshi
Who cares about X when there is Y?

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davelnewton
What's X? Never heard of it.

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rubiquity
X is a windowing server and that shuts down all the time.

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davelnewton
(Back in the day I had a three-year X session, and that was on an AIX RS-6000;
couldn't hardly believe it.)

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DiabloD3
As a former X user, that's absolutely amazing, but then I realized you're on
AIX. IBM loves doing the impossible regularly.

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davelnewton
Compiling for it was such a royal pain :(

Made a great footrest, though. AND 128M OF RAM HOLY COW.

Ah, those were the days.

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anon3_
You don't need to be magnificent and newsworthy to be successful as a business
either. You can be quietly successful as well.

There is this fetish in the valley with external validation. Often times, even
the public, sluttiest startups end up touting, over-promising and subsequently
under-delivering.

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informatimago
Same here. :-)

