Re:Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
by TeMPOraL on Sunday April 07, 2019 @07:16AM
(#19596110)
Moonshots would be cool if they were actually aiming at the Moon, not just churning out websites only incrementally different from other websites. I do wonder how much this churn contributes to the West not being able to do any actual moonshots.
Smartwatches are not "moonshots". They shouldn't be treated as such. They could be a component of one, though, and society would benefit from components being economically stable, instead of imploding after few years. Pebble was arguably the sanest smartwatch design out there - long battery life, power-efficient screens, hackable[0]. Because they suddenly wanted to get too big too fast, the world today does not have any smartwatch of comparable quality and utility.
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[0] - not just in terms of writing watch faces; people did try to use them as medical devices[1], and they even had a protocol for attaching custom hardware that didn't go anywhere, but probably would if the company was still around
Smartwatches are not "moonshots". They shouldn't be treated as such. They could be a component of one, though, and society would benefit from components being economically stable, instead of imploding after few years. Pebble was arguably the sanest smartwatch design out there - long battery life, power-efficient screens, hackable[0]. Because they suddenly wanted to get too big too fast, the world today does not have any smartwatch of comparable quality and utility.
--
[0] - not just in terms of writing watch faces; people did try to use them as medical devices[1], and they even had a protocol for attaching custom hardware that didn't go anywhere, but probably would if the company was still around
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5018102/