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Comment by dkural | Hacker News Reader

Wolfram is the ultimate company failing in product thinking. For decades they yell "You can do anything with this!", but fail to identify, specifically, one thing it does better than other products that are designed to specifically do that thing. Thus for anything it could do, other products spend more attention and do that specific thing better/cheaper, with a tighter UX and more content.

It turns out most people don't care if their car is also a surface-to-air missile, or if their dishwasher can also compose poems.

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But you can only really say they are failing, if you are looking at them through a short-term lens. Interviews with Stephen Wolfram give the impression that he is thinking long-term (as in, his entire lifetime and beyond).

Mathematica does actually seem to have dominated its niche for decades. People did and do all manner of things with it.

Wolfram Alpha, their "computational knowledge engine", has only been live for 6.5 years. It's sort of baffling who it is for (but I do, very occasionally, find it extremely useful), but it seems what they are trying to do is bigger than a normal startup that helps you find a taxi or rent out your extra bedroom or search the news.

They may well fail, but I don't think you can say that they have failed yet.

This is what Wolfram says to their engineers who question it. Wolfram / Mathematica has been around for a while. What's the long-term idea? What exactly will it do better than some other tool in that category? You can't reach there if you don't know where you're going. It's worse than failing - they don't know what they are supposed to be failing at.

It's the ultimate example of a technology in search of a problem. They got it pretty close to right with adoption of mathematica in academia but has yet to seem to really take off in industry.

Watson has the same problem - and when they released the SDK last year it was kind of like, well, just try it, but they seem to have at least determined to focus on health care.

Yeah, but it's still fun to actually bolt the missile fins onto the car, even if it's being driven by an unstoppable maniac :)

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