Google Wave.
At work we use Slack, Email, Google Docs, etc. Weāre 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. Weāre trialling Notion for some things and itās good. What should be a Wiki?
Whenever we have any of these discussions, I always feel like weāre circling around what Wave once was, and potentially could have been. It wasnāt 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.
XMPP. The entire chat landscape is a damn travesty right now. First Facebook disappeared behind itās 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Inbox. And I donāt āfind my favorite Inbox features in Gmailā. If you canāt tell Iām still bitter about it :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
BeOS, a modern operating system that supported SMP, preemptive multitasking, and a journaling file system waaaaay before Windows 95 was even released.
Rdio. Music Streaming service. Not sure what happened after they closed up shop but the UI was beautiful and they had great performance.
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.
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.
Sega Dreamcast. All Sony had to say was "PS2 is coming next year" and everyone stopped listening to what they could get today.
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.
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!
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 āonlineā while it was sitting unnoticed in tab on my browser.
I know GTalk is still alive and thereās WhatsApp, Telegram and such but I guess I miss the synchronous conversations back then, when people would still say āYou gonna be online tonight? Letās talk about it thereā
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.
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.
Nokia N9 and its OS: Meego. Imho this was in so many aspects "UX just done right".
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.
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.
Nokia linux tablets/phones n800x series and their Maemo OS
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.
Yahoo Pipes was an excellent tool for mashing up RSS feeds.
Wow, Iām surprised thereās nothing about the Lisp Machines/Smalltalk... Remember āWorse is Betterā?
And there is Xanadu, the ultimate hypermedia system. Itās a pity that no one (who could fund them) really understood the concept back then and it became vaporware...
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.
turntable.fm was super fun! wish they had something like this now.
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.
Gtalk - the very lightweight IM
+1 XMPP - in still finding it puzzling that it's not deployed and used more often
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.
iPod Nano (6th gen) and to a lesser extent, the iPod Shuffle. Itās the best clip-on music player Iāve ever used, and thereās a void now with it being fully discontinued. Iām not a fan of their intended replacement (iPhone + Bluetooth headphones) due to weight and the headphone options available.
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.
Mozilla Persona
Segway. They managed to keep it secret until the official announcement, and at the time you wouldnāt have believed it if you hadnāt actually seen it (video of it on network news, that is).
Usenet, IRC, RSS, XMPP, ... Well, still rockin'
Microsoft Courier. A dual-screen tablet that was basically OneNote in hardware form.
Swype.
It disappeared from my phone this week and I'm in shambles.
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. :(
last.fm
Although it didn't die yet, it certainly doesn't live up to its potential.
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
Windows Phone
Zune
Gowalla.
Using geographical location to find digital items way before Ingress and Pokemon Go. The design was gorgeous too.
Commodore Amiga? It took several years for the PC world to have a similar capable standard machine?
The Amiga.
Amie.st : a website for legal song downloads that did demand-based pricing. Prices started at zero but as they became more popular, their value would rise. You could also "recommend" songs and if their value rose, you'd get the difference in value credited to you.
Rewarded early participants in music discovery. Clever mechanic.
The Apple Newton. Tons of really interesting stuff under the hood (a scripting language inspired by Self, an object store with transactions, a micro-kernel inspired by Mach that supported threading, virtual memory and fine-grained permissions, etc., etc.). Pretty whizzy for 1992.
The hardware was too expensive and bulky, and the software tooling was never really there (I remember someone on the team comparing our dev tools with the newly released Visual Basic).
The first release of the Newton was plagued with bugs (it shipped maybe 4-6 months too early) and had a hardware issue -- noise in the digitizer -- that made its handwriting recognition system perform very badly. Early consumer experience with it wasn't great, and that painted the product with fail and derision; the Doonesbury cartoon was accurate at the time.
OS/2
A better DOS than DOS
A better Windows than Windows
Microsoft used the OEM tax to force Windows preinstalled than OS/2. Then development dwindled and Microsoft made Visual Studio for Windows.
It is still a good OS and OSFree is trying to open source it.
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.
Plan 9
Ericsson T28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_T28 It has an awesome feature: quickly press the power button when it's off, and then you can see what time it is now. I really love this feature because with it I could quickly see the time without turning it on or waiting, for example when I am falling asleep or on the plane. But haven't seen this similar feature any more. So sorry for that.
Visual Basic 6
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).
Ringly. It was a well executed niche product that was priced at for-profit margins. Not sure why the company went under, but they did. As anyone with kids know, not everything needs to have a screen or be "smart" (aka pain in the ass). There's a lot to be said for simple, elegant functionality and long battery life. I'm sure that they could relaunch with a 10 person lifestyle company.
Google Inbox The ONLY email client I was satisfied with.
Newton MessagePad 2000 and 2100
Not startup-related, but: Long-life incandescent light bulbs.
They were done in by "planned obsolescence"; I haven't watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU) yet but it has a good ratio.
I can't stand the light from LED or fluorescent light bulbs, and GE can pour themselves a warm bath.
FirefoxOS
WebOS
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.
Light Table
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...
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 :-(
Angular 1.
I must admit, Angular 1 is productive to me. But its custom directive failed so much for a composition model.
It's a pity, though.
I 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 Ć la Spotify, was way before its time. I think it was the first such offering ever.
Unfortunately its "app store" had a total of 47 apps. On the plus side, you can install every Zune app ever at once :P
It also runs IE5, I think? Maybe IE6? It barely supported CSS at all.
Path. A private social network with a great UI. We set it up for our extended family and the children could use it without exposure to Facebook etc.
Path had nice UI innovations that were later merged into other platforms. I guess people prefer a bigger audience over privacy.
Hypercard
OS/2
Google Reader
Google Wave
The Commodore Amiga, it had the advantage until Macs got color cards with the Mac II series. VGA gave IBM PCs with Sound Cards an advantage.
The Amiga had true multitasking for a 68K Machine and even ran MS-DOS and MacOS with emulators. Problem is they could only get game makers to write software for the Amiga. The business software, video editing, etc came too late. They still make Amiga systems with PowerPC chips now.
AROS is an open source of AmigaOS 3.1: http://aros.sourceforge.net/
Apple A/UX
IMHO the final Apple product released before they turned intolerably smug.
Jawbone Bluetooth headsets. They offered the best noise cancelation and at one point was everywhere. Their execs made their products cheap and inferior, required payment for software updates.
Friendfeed? [1] It was a great social media aggregator.
Groove Networks [2] a serverless team app.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
[2] http://www2.sys-con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/WebServices/archives/...
dotCloud and a lot of other PAAS platforms.
Its ironic since with Docker + Kubernetes, folks essentially are recreating their own PAAS from scratch, but wouldn't use a prebuilt one...
Lotus Improv
Google Inbox
SGI workstations
Sun NeWS
Firewire, Had Apple not insisted on the Royalty may be we could have a world with better I/O. Instead everyone jumped ( back ) to USB and USB 2.0
SmallTalk could have been used by Sun instead of Java.
Stumbleupon
Tastekid
C-thru Axis-49. Velocity sensitive hexagonal midi keyboard. Came out just before Kickstarter, and had early issues since a lot of their preorders fell through. Also shipped with the awful Harmonic Table layout, and needed manual conversion to Wicki-Hayden. But it's an amazing instrument, with everything right under your fingers.
The mugshot project. 2006. it could have been so much. But it was ahead of its time, I guess. (Disclaimer: I might be biased, I work at Red Hat)
BeOS and BeBox, made BeOS for PowerMacs until Apple stopped providing support for new boxes. Was going to be bought out by Apple to make the new MacOSX but they bought out Next and got Steve Jobs back.
HaikuOS tries to open source BeOS: https://www.haiku-os.org/
Everpix http://www.everpix.com/
When I first found it, I knew that's the photo backup I need. But when I was ready to pay for it, it was closing down. I thought it'd be a great fit at Amazon. But Alas, some great products don't succeed.
Google Reader :-(
an alternative to common spreadsheet software, which I mentioned before at [1]
Google wave, definitely. I still havenāt found an alternative that suits me.
RethinkDB
Riak
Nokia 3310, the first version.
It was the most reliable, solid mobile phone I have ever had. Battery life is really long, talk quality is very good, screen does not crack when you drop it.
I 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.
TwitFog - Allowed you to watch all of the images being uploaded to Twitter in real time. It was the closest we ever came to being able to watch the Matrix unfold.
You don't need to study these things in depth, the studying has been done. Google "why good products fail", read some articles, check out some books.
Detour. What a great app that is so educational and fun. Was sorry to see it get acquired. They are hundreds more cities that could use this.
Amiga: born a champion, but Commodore fucked it up.
Betamax
JavaFX
Silverlight
Adobe AIR
Hear One earbuds. Fantastic sounding, weighed only 14g and the noise canceling and filtering really, really worked.
OS/2 warp. A great operating system.
Microsoft Zune
XUL/XPCOM
(Someone else already said Google Wave.)
Aeroscope. Probably the nicest portable oscilloscope I've seen. It fizzled away, and until CrowdSupply found a few units, I couldn't even buy a spare for just in case.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...
My love life ... of course I might have a career as a comedian if my wife does not see this.
Unpopular opinion: Windows Phone?
WinAmp
ICQ
rapbits. music sharing app on imessage that was dope https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4
I'm sure many, many games didn't, due to market visability.
Changetip was neat but got acquihired and shut down
Canonical Bazaar
Microsoft Encarta
The Commodore Amiga.
Excuse me while I go reminisce....
VRML & Chromeffects - too early.
Nokia N9 + Meego/Maemo devices.
Inbox by Google.
SIGH.
Multics
Visual Basic Classic (VB6)
Toshiba Libretto
Microsoft Zune.
Priceline Gas.
Going outside
Google Wave
BeOS.
BeOS
V2
Tivo AOL
NeXT.
Zeo
www.airwavemini.com
The promise of a decentralised internet where the distinction between producer and consumer is entirely up to the person at the keyboard.
Nokia's maemo phones were great, both of them.
BlackBerry.
You would get your mail instantly, and could effectively IM on it.
I'm still not even sure how often my iPhone polls or updates, that said it's been a while.
The 'absolute connectivity' of the BB I don't think has been repeated since.
I'm getting sick of features, and honestly I think that's what I want now - a black and white BlackBerry. Just smaller.
The old Skype.
Your thoughts are wrong, plain and simple. Delusional at best. It was so far from a great product that I'd like a list of other things you think are good so that I can avoid them.
This is a very personal device segment, and privacy/security should come before everything else. I couldn't imagine being naive enough to think some nonamers could achieve this, or that android is even worth mentioning in this context. Apple's the only one to actually ship a compelling and useful product in any capacity past mere novelty.
Pebble was a dogshit piece of hardware with an absolutely dogshit API. It was far from slimline, nearly unreadable in most real world conditions (try reading an exit number off your wrist while you're on a motorcycle, I'll wait), slow as hell, and wildly insecure. They were also extremely fragile (they are incapable of surviving a common skateboard fall, let alone a brush with a brick wall while walking). Nothing screams quality like soft rubber buttons most commonly found on happy meal toys and TV remotes and a screen reminescient of a tamagatchi. I used those survival scenarios because they are all things my fruit watch has shrugged off without so much as a scratch! Actually took a chunk out of the corner of the brick wall when I accidentally swung my wrist into it :X
Pull the wool from over your eyes and look back into all the promises they made, and then walked back from. Do you remember when they told us it'd have sapphire crystal faces? Or injection molded ceramic bodies? The myriad list of features that silently fell by the wayside. They're a textbook example of how to fleece idiots on kickstarter. By the way, part of their problem wasn't that they tried to get too big, it was that they preferred large numbers of cheap hires. They weren't being hired for their talent, they were being mined for their social capital. This is an extremely common tactic found in other industries such as the loan/mortgage refinancing industry. Hire graduates > harvest referrals from friends and family who think they're helping this person look good at work > gone 18 months later with nothing to show for it.
Before you write me off as a hater, know that I was one of the very first backers on kickstarter and was so utterly disappointed that they had missed the mark to such an extent that I threw it in a macerating toilet and flushed it, then tweeted the video to the CEO. It's so much more than hate. It's vehement disgust. I just spit on the ground
The 1st gen apple watch by itself is leaps and bounds more useful. I specifically mention the 1st gen watch because of the way it works with the phone (similar to how og pebble functioned, only, not pants on head worthless), and also because it's still the thinnest amongst their roster. If you never used it for anything else other than haptic feedback to know wether you will have to turn left or right while driving, and heart rate/steps, it would still be leagues above anything Pebble ever managed to ship.
Good rittance.
I'm not interested in anything you have to say in response to this. I just want everyone else to know that pebble was so far removed from anything resembling "great", let alone "good" or even "merely ok"
Ok mister hall monitor I'll be sure to give a fuck next time I make a new account
Bet you money this guy worked for pebble. Here's a link to the original comment in it's uncensored format https://ghostbin.com/paste/kuxfy/raw
Tesla
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.