Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by Lowkeyloki on Sunday April 07, 2019 @04:59AM (#19595659)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by viraptor on Sunday April 07, 2019 @09:46AM (#19596722)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by onlyrealcuzzo on Sunday April 07, 2019 @10:05AM (#19596834)

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

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by randiantech on Sunday April 07, 2019 @10:09AM (#19596860)

If im not wrong it was developed using GWT.

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by kyrra on Sunday April 07, 2019 @10:31AM (#19596966)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

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

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by paul7986 on Sunday April 07, 2019 @11:46AM (#19597503)

Is Youtube written in Angular? I find myself having to refresh the page (Firefox is my default) to load the proper video fairly often; annoying UX.

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by buzzerbetrayed on Sunday April 07, 2019 @11:32AM (#19597400)

Wave predates angular, but good attempt at a dig?

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by danpalmer on Sunday April 07, 2019 @07:29AM (#19596147)

Yeah I'm not even sure that pitching it for business productivity would have been enough. The reasons it shines: chat, collaborative editing, blurred lines between documents, emails, and chat – those are built on concepts that didn't exist back then. We can see the value of it now precisely because we've had the intermediate stage of Slack/Docs/Gmail/etc. If that doesn't mean "ahead of its time" I don't know what does.

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by 0-_-0 on Sunday April 07, 2019 @06:44AM (#19596002)

> 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 wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.

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Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed? by gcb0 on Sunday April 07, 2019 @07:25AM (#19596135)

because that would have required a single product person, and Google have none.

Google only have failed engineers turned product manager. they live and die by some random metrics. the gmail PM would never accept anything there that reduced time spent (or some other random, disconnected from reality, success metric) by a second!

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