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.
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.
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.
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.
For my purposes, it is a productivity boost to have calendar, slack etc. notifications and be able to mute everything by holding a button.
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.
Hasn't the Apple Watch been outselling Rolex etc.?
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swi...
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.
I'm still looking for a smartwatch that hits all the beats of Pebble.
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.
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.
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.
[0] Please see https://unity8.io/ and https://forums.ubports.com/category/36/unity8
Trying it out in a VM for now.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Same.
Well, it's not the only reason I'm in contact with less people now, but it's a major component.
Google stopped XMPP compatibility before FB messenger did. I believe the latter still had an interface to the XMPP world up until 2015.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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 made ttdashboard.com which was a live statistics dashboard for turntable.
"I still think RSS is a better way", fixed that for you.
(No affiliation, just a big fan)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see Palm already mentioned. Neo Geo.
Obviously everything I have done was great--too advanced for its time to succeed.
Great product, competitive sector.
Then Sony pretty much messed it up with NetMD.
Wonderful video about the format: https://youtu.be/kU3BceoMuaA
In Japan, you can still buy blank minidiscs in any normal electronics store.
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.
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.
[0] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/managing-in...
Any recommendations for self hosted XMPP stuff?
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.
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.
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-...
(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)
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.
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.
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.
Apparently it now has "joined" mix.com, where you can only join via Facebook, twitter or google authentication. Thanks but no thanks.
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...
What about the Nintendo Switch?
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”
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.
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.
Not that I think Google's hardware is doing a bang up job. Pixel buds are the worst headphones I've ever owned.
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.
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.
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...
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.
+1 XMPP - in still finding it puzzling that it's not deployed and used more often
Although it didn't die yet, it certainly doesn't live up to its potential.
Microsoft's WPF
Using geographical location to find digital items way before Ingress and Pokemon Go. The design was gorgeous too.
Rewarded early participants in music discovery. Clever mechanic.
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.
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.
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.
Last.fm, well. I really miss it.
Windows Phone and especially the Metro Design (although some of it carried into Modern UI).
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.
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.
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.
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 had nice UI innovations that were later merged into other platforms. I guess people prefer a bigger audience over privacy.
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/
IMHO the final Apple product released before they turned intolerably smug.
Groove Networks [2] a serverless team app.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
[2] http://www2.sys-con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/...
Its ironic since with Docker + Kubernetes, folks essentially are recreating their own PAAS from scratch, but wouldn't use a prebuilt one...
Google Inbox
SGI workstations
Sun NeWS
Tastekid
HaikuOS tries to open source BeOS: https://www.haiku-os.org/
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.
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.
(Someone else already said Google Wave.)
https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...
Excuse me while I go reminisce....
SIGH.
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.
