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Comment by dooglius | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the two of you may be "harbinger customers", the interesting economic phenomenon of people who tend to like products that flop.

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That's exactly me! The reason I know that everyone else has bad taste is because all of my favourite products end up failing in the marketplace and getting pulled off the shelves.

- Sent from my Xperia Compact

oh god, I just broke my last xperia compact that stayed with me for years(x compact) and it's impossible to find something small again, not even getting into android updates and a cleanish android experience.

well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...

I've heard of that term before. But when looking at

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

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad

and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.

Damn, am I a harbinger customer? I loved my Motorola Droid, Droid 4, and Droid Turbo, none of which saw nearly the success of the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies.

I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.

FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.

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