
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? - mrborgen
I&#x27;ve often heard the claim that the startup graveyard is full of great products that didn&#x27;t succeed (e.g. because the startup wasn&#x27;t good enough on marketing, or because they didn&#x27;t solve a big enough problem).<p>What are some examples of this?<p>If there are examples of truly great products that eventually died, I&#x27;d like to study them more in-depth.
======
gtf21
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.

~~~
jawns
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.

~~~
gnicholas
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.

~~~
mruts
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.

~~~
tech2
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.

------
danpalmer
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.

~~~
Lowkeyloki
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.

~~~
viraptor
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.

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

~~~
randiantech
If im not wrong it was developed using GWT.

~~~
kyrra
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave)

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

------
WD-42
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.

~~~
com2kid
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.

~~~
arendtio
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...](https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/#mod-stream-mgmt)

~~~
seba_dos1
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.

~~~
arendtio
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....](https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/blob/master/ejabberd.yml.example#L223)

~~~
seba_dos1
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...](http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/ejabberd/ejabberd_18.12.1-2.debian.tar.xz)
(debian/patches/ejabberd.yml.example.diff)

------
hn_throwaway_99
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.

~~~
lukifer
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.

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

~~~
drdrey
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.

------
arendtio
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_tablet)

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

~~~
corysama
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.

------
Lowkeyloki
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.

~~~
franee
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.

~~~
neuronic
> bring the linux desktop to the masses

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

~~~
derekp7
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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
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.)

------
jdietrich
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinberger)

~~~
throwaway8879
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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtOjC0NLFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtOjC0NLFw)

~~~
wyclif
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.

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

~~~
jonas21
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.

~~~
daxterspeed
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.

~~~
piccolbo
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.

------
milkytron
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.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
>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.

~~~
SquareWheel
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design)

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

------
ldigas
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.

~~~
jayalpha
"I still think RSS was a better way"

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

~~~
Deivuh
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.

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

------
avinium
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.

~~~
fabricexpert
> Totally illegal business model

It was no different to YouTube’s...

~~~
colejohnson66
Are you referring to VEVO? Because VEVO is entirely legal

~~~
avinium
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.

------
tgb
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.

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

~~~
tgb
Thanks!

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

~~~
rocky1138
NAT killed this dream.

~~~
test6554
Having to buy static IPs rather than just getting one with your internet
subscription.

~~~
rocky1138
I wish there had been stronger pushback legislatively for these two (and
other) attributes of ISPs.

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

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
BeOS was indeed great, but its first version was released a few months _after_
Win95.

~~~
pmiller2
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).

~~~
Lammy
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 :)

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

~~~
dictum
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.

~~~
zorked
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.

------
apexkid
Google glass.

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

~~~
icelancer
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.

~~~
dswalter
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?

~~~
icelancer
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.

------
znpy
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.

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

------
rocky1138
Sega Dreamcast. All Sony had to say was "PS2 is coming next year" and everyone
stopped listening to what they could get _today_.

~~~
shhehebehdh
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.

~~~
rocky1138
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.

~~~
rwallace
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.

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

~~~
rwallace
[https://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-
Generat...](https://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-
Generation/dp/0062276700)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Thanks!

------
oneowl
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.

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

What about the Nintendo Switch?

~~~
geddy
It’s not a dedicated, it’s a hybrid.

~~~
AsyncAwait
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.

~~~
Nition
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.

------
ksaj
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!

~~~
technofiend
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.

~~~
fyfy18
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.

------
Deivuh
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”

~~~
ohazi
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.

------
HHalvi
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.

~~~
luord
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.

------
wj
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.

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

~~~
bufferoverflow
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.

~~~
typenil
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.

------
sdx23
Nokia N9 and its OS: Meego. Imho this was in so many aspects "UX just done
right".

~~~
Nition
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-...](http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-
nokia-n9-alarm-clock/)

------
indentit
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.

~~~
timwis
Check out the fxtec pro1: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/slider-phone-reborn-
fxtec-pro1...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/slider-phone-reborn-fxtec-
pro1-delivers-android-9-plus-slide-out-qwerty-keyboard/)

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

------
charpede
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.

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

------
x11
Nokia linux tablets/phones n800x series and their Maemo OS

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

~~~
x11
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.

------
rwallace
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.

~~~
protomyth
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.

~~~
orionblastar
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.

~~~
icelancer
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.

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

~~~
Fuzzwah
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](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.

------
pcr910303
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...

~~~
rwallace
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.

------
jccalhoun
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.

~~~
anyfoo
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.

~~~
alexis_fr
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.

~~~
tass
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).

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

~~~
toomanyrichies
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.

~~~
milkytron
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.

------
darpa_escapee
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.

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

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

------
kopos
Gtalk - the very lightweight IM

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

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

------
sfRattan
Aereo:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

~~~
anbop
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.

------
rbritton
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.

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

~~~
rbritton
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.

------
apexkid
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.

~~~
jobigoud
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW49IKs1kE)

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

~~~
seaish
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.

~~~
jobigoud
> 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/](https://www.instagram.com/goro.fujita/)

------
beefman
Mozilla Persona

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona)

~~~
sergiotapia
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](https://github.com/sergiotapia/ASP.Net-MVC3-Persona-Demo)

------
drfuchs
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).

~~~
stewbrew
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.

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

~~~
borgel
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?

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

~~~
oblomovshchina
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.

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

~~~
rcfox
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.

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

------
Eyes
Swype.

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

~~~
elcomet
Isn't this integrated in all modern keyboards?

At least Google keyboard does it now!

~~~
austhrow743
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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?

~~~
austhrow743
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.

------
tpaschalis
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. :(

~~~
zimbatm
Check out [https://www.kaiostech.com/](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

------
didymospl
last.fm

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

~~~
EamonnMR
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?

~~~
GlennS
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.

~~~
andai
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.

------
quickthrower2
Parse (although it lives on as open source and other providers, see.
[https://buddy.com/blog/parse-buddy-forever-free-full-
feature...](https://buddy.com/blog/parse-buddy-forever-free-full-features/)
for example)

Microsoft's WPF

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

~~~
tonyedgecombe
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.

------
clydethefrog
Gowalla.

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

~~~
tomcatfish
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...](https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/4bn-mistake-yahoo-bought-precursor-
pokemon-go-2013-then-killed-game-1572835)

------
belltaco
Windows Phone

Zune

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

~~~
Someone1234
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.

~~~
asveikau
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.

~~~
Someone1234
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.

~~~
asveikau
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?

~~~
Someone1234
> 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.

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

~~~
sorum
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Commercial_success)

------
scarejunba
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.

------
sien
The Amiga.

~~~
ilaksh
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.

------
kabdib
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.

------
orionblastar
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](http://www.osfree.org)

------
colechristensen
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.

~~~
chrisco255
Do you mean these: [https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Light-Bulbs-LED-
Bulbs/S...](https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Light-Bulbs-LED-
Bulbs/SWITCH/N-5yc1vZbm79Zd6x) ?

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

------
jinjiang
Ericsson T28
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

------
sagebird
Plan 9

~~~
sagebird
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.

------
zubairq
Visual Basic 6

~~~
cb504
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.

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

------
espeed
Beta
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war)

------
moeffju
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).

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

------
kissgyorgy
Google Inbox The ONLY email client I was satisfied with.

------
scurvy
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.

------
jdougan
Newton MessagePad 2000 and 2100

------
OneWordSoln
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](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.

~~~
jdietrich
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](https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights)

------
crappybird
FirefoxOS

------
hamandcheese
WebOS

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

~~~
bruceb
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.

------
ksec
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.

~~~
tyleo
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.

~~~
vvillena
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.

------
watersb
Magic Cap

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap)

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

------
ilaksh
Light Table

~~~
kris-s
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/](http://lighttable.com/2019/03/31/New-year-old-plans/)

------
jacobedawson
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...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-myo-
gesture-control-armband-project/)

~~~
krcz
I believe CTRL-Labs took over that goal and is actively pursuing it:
[https://www.ctrl-labs.com/](https://www.ctrl-labs.com/)

------
sonnyblarney
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.

------
revskill
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.

~~~
newsbinator
I feel like VueJs is a worthy successor, no?

------
bothra90
Prismatic (used to be at [https://getprismatic.com](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 :-(

~~~
mattdeboard
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 :)

------
milkey_mouse
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.

------
mamp
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.

~~~
gloira32
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...](https://www.cultofmac.com/144946/path-uploads-and-stores-your-iphones-
entire-address-book-on-its-servers/)

------
noeltock
Hypercard

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

------
jelling
OS/2

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

~~~
ksaj
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/](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.

~~~
mrbill
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](https://www.vmssoftware.com/products_roadmap.html))

~~~
ksaj
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.

------
bufferoverflow
Google Reader

Google Wave

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

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

------
orionblastar
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/](http://aros.sourceforge.net/)

------
fma
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.

------
ncmncm
Apple A/UX

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

~~~
watersb
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.

~~~
ncmncm
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.

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

Groove Networks [2] a serverless team app.

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

[2] [http://www2.sys-
con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/...](http://www2.sys-
con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/0309/maurer/index.html)

------
pdeva1
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...

~~~
chatmasta
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.

------
maxharris
Lotus Improv

Google Inbox

SGI workstations

Sun NeWS

------
ksec
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

~~~
pcr910303
Yeah... I agree. It took 20 years for the FireWire to be widespread enough for
companies started to make products for them (Thunderbolt 3).

------
mvaliente2001
SmallTalk could have been used by Sun instead of Java.

------
Ftuuky
Stumbleupon

Tastekid

------
jefftk
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.

------
orionblastar
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/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)

------
jwildeboer
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/](https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6955-2/)

------
chanux
Everpix [http://www.everpix.com/](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.

------
sonnyblarney
The old Skype.

~~~
pier25
It wasn't successful?

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

------
ldigas
Google Reader :-(

~~~
Lowkeyloki
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.

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

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

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

------
zenzonomy
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.

------
MehdiHK
RethinkDB

------
codeadict
Riak

------
yitchelle
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.

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

------
quickthrower2
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.

~~~
JdeBP
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/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18823871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18823871)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361168)

~~~
quickthrower2
Thank you

------
peterwwillis
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.

------
jasonwilk
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.

------
basementcat
OpenDoc

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc)

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

~~~
icelancer
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.

------
jayalpha
Chumpy

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby)

------
ilaksh
Betamax

------
karmakaze
JavaFX

Silverlight

Adobe AIR

~~~
jtbayly
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.

~~~
bri3d
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.

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

------
steQ
OS/2 warp. A great operating system.

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

------
bnkamalesh
Microsoft Zune

------
hawaiian
XUL/XPCOM

(Someone else already said Google Wave.)

------
colinng
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...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireless-
oscilloscope)

------
elankart
Unpopular opinion: Windows Phone?

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

------
sytelus
WinAmp

ICQ

~~~
alok-g
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.

~~~
xivzgrev
WINAMP! It really whips the llama's ass.

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

------
goldenzun
rapbits. music sharing app on imessage that was dope
[https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4](https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4)

------
ikeboy
Changetip was neat but got acquihired and shut down

------
alok-g
Canonical Bazaar

Microsoft Encarta

~~~
wreath
> Microsoft Encarta

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

~~~
mftrhu
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.

------
chrstphrhrt
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax)

------
harel
The Commodore Amiga.

Excuse me while I go reminisce....

------
perilunar
VRML & Chromeffects - too early.

~~~
Theodores
...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'.

------
danilocesar
Nokia N9 + Meego/Maemo devices.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Inbox by Google.

SIGH.

------
ggm
Multics

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

* [https://multicians.org/myths.html](https://multicians.org/myths.html)

~~~
trn
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.

~~~
unused0
And two systems to the NSA.

------
MehdiHK
Visual Basic Classic (VB6)

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

------
knopkop_
Toshiba Libretto

------
norin
Microsoft Zune.

------
jayess
Priceline Gas.

------
test6554
Going outside

------
modarts
Google Wave

------
wdr1
BeOS.

------
bane
BeOS

------
jayalpha
V2

------
joelaaronseely
Tivo AOL

------
AnimalMuppet
NeXT.

~~~
jmalicki
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.

~~~
patrickg_zill
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.

------
avivo
Zeo

------
rodneyg_
www.airwavemini.com

------
purplezooey
Tesla

~~~
ncmncm
Too soon. :-)

