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Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

by mrborgen on 4/6/19, 8:02 PM with 636 comments

I've often heard the claim that the startup graveyard is full of great products that didn't succeed (e.g. because the startup wasn't good enough on marketing, or because they didn't solve a big enough problem).

What are some examples of this?

If there are examples of truly great products that eventually died, I'd like to study them more in-depth.

  • by gtf21 on 4/6/19, 11:07 PM

    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.

  • by danpalmer on 4/7/19, 7:59 AM

    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.

  • by WD-42 on 4/7/19, 1:29 AM

    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.

  • by hn_throwaway_99 on 4/7/19, 1:11 AM

    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.

  • by arendtio on 4/6/19, 9:46 PM

    Notion Ink Adam Tablet [1] Pixel Qi Display [2]

    Altogether not a truly great tablet, but I loved the idea of the Pixel Qi display. Normal colored LCD when being used indoors with backlight enabled. But outdoors in the bright sun, the colors faded away and it became some e-paper like reflective display. That way you could use it for watching movies in the dark and reading books on the beach ;-)

    Sadly the tablet had a lot of other flaws and the colors of the LCD weren't as good as the AMOLEDs we are used to today, but every time I see one of those ebook readers with b/w display I wonder why the Pixel Qi displays didn't make it.

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

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

  • by jdietrich on 4/7/19, 3:21 AM

    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

  • by Lowkeyloki on 4/7/19, 9:18 AM

    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.

  • by mephitix on 4/6/19, 9:34 PM

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

  • by milkytron on 4/7/19, 4:00 AM

    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.

  • by ldigas on 4/7/19, 9:00 AM

    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.

  • by avinium on 4/7/19, 12:10 PM

    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.

  • by tgb on 4/7/19, 10:47 AM

    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.

  • by k_sze on 4/7/19, 6:17 AM

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

  • by valleyjo on 4/6/19, 9:02 PM

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

  • by apexkid on 4/7/19, 6:06 AM

    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.

  • by znpy on 4/7/19, 11:58 AM

    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.

  • by rocky1138 on 4/6/19, 9:38 PM

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

  • by oneowl on 4/7/19, 4:25 AM

    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.

  • by ksaj on 4/6/19, 8:49 PM

    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!

  • by Deivuh on 4/7/19, 4:30 PM

    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”

  • by HHalvi on 4/7/19, 8:41 AM

    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.

  • by wj on 4/7/19, 2:57 AM

    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.

  • by sdx23 on 4/7/19, 9:04 AM

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

  • by charpede on 4/7/19, 2:57 AM

    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.

  • by indentit on 4/7/19, 7:25 AM

    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.

  • by x11 on 4/6/19, 9:34 PM

    Nokia linux tablets/phones n800x series and their Maemo OS

  • by rwallace on 4/7/19, 1:02 AM

    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.

  • by vax on 4/6/19, 10:20 PM

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

  • by pcr910303 on 4/7/19, 12:26 PM

    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...

  • by jccalhoun on 4/7/19, 2:12 AM

    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.

  • by ryeon on 4/7/19, 12:01 AM

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

  • by darpa_escapee on 4/7/19, 1:56 AM

    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.

  • by kopos on 4/7/19, 3:42 AM

    Gtalk - the very lightweight IM

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

  • by sfRattan on 4/7/19, 4:17 AM

    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.

  • by rbritton on 4/7/19, 3:38 AM

    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.

  • by apexkid on 4/7/19, 6:04 AM

    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.

  • by beefman on 4/7/19, 3:45 PM

  • by drfuchs on 4/7/19, 1:19 AM

    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).

  • by gnuarch on 4/6/19, 9:27 PM

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

  • by freehunter on 4/7/19, 12:06 AM

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

  • by Eyes on 4/6/19, 8:58 PM

    Swype.

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

  • by tpaschalis on 4/7/19, 11:04 AM

    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. :(

  • by didymospl on 4/6/19, 9:29 PM

    last.fm

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

  • by quickthrower2 on 4/6/19, 8:52 PM

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

    Microsoft's WPF

  • by belltaco on 4/6/19, 9:19 PM

    Windows Phone

    Zune

  • by clydethefrog on 4/7/19, 12:34 AM

    Gowalla.

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

  • by wslh on 4/7/19, 12:08 PM

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

  • by sien on 4/6/19, 9:20 PM

    The Amiga.

  • by scarejunba on 4/7/19, 9:32 AM

    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.

  • by kabdib on 4/7/19, 5:34 PM

    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.

  • by orionblastar on 4/7/19, 4:30 AM

    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

  • by colechristensen on 4/7/19, 12:41 AM

    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.

  • by sagebird on 4/7/19, 12:12 AM

    Plan 9

  • by jinjiang on 4/7/19, 11:37 AM

    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.

  • by zubairq on 4/7/19, 7:10 AM

    Visual Basic 6

  • by espeed on 4/6/19, 9:49 PM

  • by moeffju on 4/6/19, 9:46 PM

    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).

  • by scurvy on 4/7/19, 1:47 AM

    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.

  • by kissgyorgy on 4/7/19, 10:43 AM

    Google Inbox The ONLY email client I was satisfied with.

  • by jdougan on 4/6/19, 10:40 PM

    Newton MessagePad 2000 and 2100

  • by OneWordSoln on 4/7/19, 1:30 AM

    Not startup-related, but: Long-life incandescent light bulbs.

    They were done in by "planned obsolescence"; I haven't watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU) yet but it has a good ratio.

    I can't stand the light from LED or fluorescent light bulbs, and GE can pour themselves a warm bath.

  • by crappybird on 4/7/19, 1:59 AM

    FirefoxOS

  • by hamandcheese on 4/6/19, 9:14 PM

    WebOS

  • by ksec on 4/7/19, 12:24 PM

    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.

  • by watersb on 4/7/19, 8:06 AM

  • by ilaksh on 4/7/19, 12:53 AM

    Light Table

  • by jacobedawson on 4/7/19, 9:40 AM

    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...

  • by bothra90 on 4/7/19, 4:58 AM

    Prismatic (used to be at https://getprismatic.com) - a topic/interest based newsfeed platform, but backed by an ML/AI system to learn from your reading behavior. I loved the product until it got shutdown one day :-(

  • by revskill on 4/7/19, 10:56 AM

    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.

  • by milkey_mouse on 4/7/19, 7:07 PM

    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.

  • by mamp on 4/7/19, 3:00 AM

    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.

  • by noeltock on 4/7/19, 8:10 AM

    Hypercard

  • by jelling on 4/6/19, 9:58 PM

    OS/2

  • by bufferoverflow on 4/6/19, 8:42 PM

    Google Reader

    Google Wave

  • by orionblastar on 4/7/19, 6:32 AM

    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/

  • by ncmncm on 4/7/19, 3:34 AM

    Apple A/UX

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

  • by fma on 4/7/19, 12:27 PM

    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.

  • by wslh on 4/7/19, 2:28 PM

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

    Groove Networks [2] a serverless team app.

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

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

  • by pdeva1 on 4/7/19, 12:38 AM

    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...

  • by maxharris on 4/6/19, 8:09 PM

    Lotus Improv

    Google Inbox

    SGI workstations

    Sun NeWS

  • by ksec on 4/7/19, 12:09 PM

    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

  • by mvaliente2001 on 4/7/19, 12:48 PM

    SmallTalk could have been used by Sun instead of Java.

  • by Ftuuky on 4/7/19, 12:52 AM

    Stumbleupon

    Tastekid

  • by jefftk on 4/7/19, 11:58 AM

    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.

  • by jwildeboer on 4/6/19, 9:38 PM

    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/

  • by orionblastar on 4/7/19, 6:29 AM

    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/

  • by chanux on 4/7/19, 2:05 PM

    Everpix http://www.everpix.com/

    When I first found it, I knew that's the photo backup I need. But when I was ready to pay for it, it was closing down. I thought it'd be a great fit at Amazon. But Alas, some great products don't succeed.

  • by ldigas on 4/7/19, 8:59 AM

    Google Reader :-(

  • by indentit on 4/7/19, 7:29 AM

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

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

  • by dgellow on 4/7/19, 12:20 PM

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

  • by MehdiHK on 4/7/19, 4:54 AM

    RethinkDB

  • by codeadict on 4/7/19, 12:59 AM

    Riak

  • by yitchelle on 4/8/19, 10:47 AM

    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.

  • by quickthrower2 on 4/7/19, 10:17 AM

    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.

  • by zenzonomy on 4/12/19, 1:54 PM

    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.

  • by peterwwillis on 4/7/19, 1:48 PM

    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.

  • by jasonwilk on 4/7/19, 1:49 PM

    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.

  • by basementcat on 4/7/19, 5:17 AM

  • by egypturnash on 4/7/19, 1:07 AM

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

  • by jayalpha on 4/7/19, 5:19 PM

  • by ilaksh on 4/7/19, 12:50 AM

    Betamax

  • by karmakaze on 4/6/19, 10:57 PM

    JavaFX

    Silverlight

    Adobe AIR

  • by oceanghost on 4/7/19, 7:04 AM

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

  • by steQ on 4/7/19, 5:45 PM

    OS/2 warp. A great operating system.

  • by bnkamalesh on 4/7/19, 4:22 AM

    Microsoft Zune

  • by hawaiian on 4/7/19, 6:52 AM

    XUL/XPCOM

    (Someone else already said Google Wave.)

  • by colinng on 4/7/19, 12:50 AM

    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...

  • by sloaken on 4/9/19, 8:59 PM

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

  • by elankart on 4/7/19, 2:36 PM

    Unpopular opinion: Windows Phone?

  • by sytelus on 4/7/19, 3:44 AM

    WinAmp

    ICQ

  • by goldenzun on 4/6/19, 9:12 PM

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

  • by Madmallard on 4/7/19, 8:10 PM

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

  • by ikeboy on 4/6/19, 9:38 PM

    Changetip was neat but got acquihired and shut down

  • by alok-g on 4/6/19, 9:50 PM

    Canonical Bazaar

    Microsoft Encarta

  • by chrstphrhrt on 4/6/19, 9:44 PM

  • by harel on 4/7/19, 11:38 AM

    The Commodore Amiga.

    Excuse me while I go reminisce....

  • by perilunar on 4/7/19, 6:44 AM

    VRML & Chromeffects - too early.

  • by danilocesar on 4/7/19, 3:49 AM

    Nokia N9 + Meego/Maemo devices.

  • by Fire-Dragon-DoL on 4/7/19, 8:07 AM

    Inbox by Google.

    SIGH.

  • by ggm on 4/7/19, 2:40 AM

    Multics

  • by MehdiHK on 4/7/19, 4:53 AM

    Visual Basic Classic (VB6)

  • by knopkop_ on 4/8/19, 11:57 AM

    Toshiba Libretto

  • by norin on 4/9/19, 8:20 AM

    Microsoft Zune.

  • by jayess on 4/8/19, 2:15 AM

    Priceline Gas.

  • by test6554 on 4/7/19, 6:06 AM

    Going outside

  • by modarts on 4/7/19, 2:58 AM

    Google Wave

  • by wdr1 on 4/7/19, 4:43 PM

    BeOS.

  • by bane on 4/7/19, 2:54 PM

    BeOS

  • by jayalpha on 4/7/19, 9:24 AM

    V2

  • by joelaaronseely on 4/7/19, 3:11 AM

    Tivo AOL

  • by AnimalMuppet on 4/7/19, 1:16 AM

    NeXT.

  • by avivo on 4/6/19, 9:03 PM

    Zeo

  • by rodneyg_ on 4/7/19, 11:43 AM

    www.airwavemini.com

  • by Yetanfou on 4/6/19, 10:49 PM

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

  • by BubRoss on 4/7/19, 12:31 AM

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

  • by sonnyblarney on 4/7/19, 2:37 AM

    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.

  • by sonnyblarney on 4/7/19, 2:38 AM

    The old Skype.

  • by purplezooey on 4/6/19, 11:04 PM

    Tesla