Tech Products Ahead of Their Time | Hacker News Reader

Tech Products Ahead of Their Time

mashable.com

21 pointsgpl19 comments

I wouldn't call it "ahead of their time". Being ahead of its time means that some critically necessary pieces that the product really needed didn't exist yet, but companies stubbornly went ahead and tried anyways (e.g., streaming video during dialup days).

A lot of these failures weren't hinged on the lack of some technology, it's just plain bad execution.

See: N-Gage. There was nothing preventing them from building a perfectly viable handheld game console that was also a phone. It was just horrifically engineered. Same story goes for the ROKR - it was not all technologically infeasible to create a phone tightly integrated with iTunes and music playing... but they just sucked at it.

Missing from the list: Google Wave. While people gave it an especially hard time, there were some fascinating ideas and technologies in it that could have taken off if only Google had waited 5 or so years to release it. Google Wave's biggest problem was its target audience. It required its users to have a significant level of technology literacy. At the time that was a minority. However, based on the current trend, it would be a perfect fit in the coming years.

I feel Wave's problem wasn't the advanced tech, even my mom figured out how to use it pretty easily. The problem I had was that they made it invite only - for a service that needs other people using it for it to work effectively. There were months after I was invited that I still had no one to use it with. Then last summer at my internship we seriously used it all the time to communicate and share between everyone in the office... and then we found out it was being shut down.

But didn't Gmail start out as invite only? Look at how it turned out.

But GMail doesn't require other people using GMail to be useful.

Google Wave was brilliant, the problem was they didn't themselves seem to know what problem it solved. The focus on the "tech side" was also a problem. Focusing so much on being able to send one character at a time live over the web was cool, and totally pointless.

There are a lot of times where I think, gosh Google Wave would have been great for this situation or that situation. Too bad they killed it before it found an audience.

Wave would have had more success if it had launched with email integration. It was a bit convoluted for typical users as well, which would be a barrier to entry for many.

P.S. Sigh... can't stand the pagination on mashable articles.

They should've integrated it into gMail like they did with Buzz and gVoice.

While I agree with the opinion that Wave was ahead of its time, it doesn't fit this article, because saying Wave was ahead of its time is an opinion, the article wants products which can be compared with more recent successes as confirmation, rather than speculation.

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