Ask HN: What successful products were deemed useless, “meh”, etc. at launch? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What successful products were deemed useless, “meh”, etc. at launch?

11 pointsthe_wheel19 comments

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

Google itself, according to the opinions of its own creators (and vinod khosla who was urging them to sell it), if their own actions are anything to judge them by:

> In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking to sell Google to search engine Excite for about $750,000. But Excite's CEO George Bell passed on the offer

And you can add the CEO of excite to that list too I suppose. So pretty much a short list of the who's who of the internet in 1999 didn't think Google was worth even a million dollars.

I would enjoy finding a collection of backstage tales like this that collectively serve to undermine the broad and unsubstantiated belief - our current generation's disguised version of the great man theory - that Superior Visionaries always know just how dominant their ideas will be (and who deserve to be proportionately rewarded for their vision and boldness and risk-taking blah blah blah) to the humble desk jockeys and implementers who end up working for them.

Twitter seemed absolutely idiotic at launch. A "Twit" was an idiot who chattered incessantly on a BBS... why would you want a network full of them?

When they were first produced, transistors were only marginally more useful than tubes. They were finicky to produce, mechanically fragile, and tended to age rapidly.

Gasoline was thought too explosive for any use, and dumped into the nearest stream to get rid of it.

This was mine. My brother was an early adopter, and I asked him why he was always on it. When he described the use case, specifically that a person could announce where they're going, and all their friends could join them, I thought it was silly.

Why not just send a group text, I asked. He said I just didn't get it, and that was probably true.

Now that it seems to be mainly political arguments, I can safely say I still don't get it...

In hindsight the key difference is that a group text only goes to that specific group of people that you have already established relationships with and have some idea who they all are, whereas with Twitter it was there the beginning of the cultural shift, due to reality shows and other factors, of publicizing one's private life.

and it turned out that at least in the beginning when the internet wasn't quite as full of garbage as it is now, that broadcasting yourself to a bunch of people you do know plus a much larger circle of people they know but whom you do not know, ended up bringing a net positive return of new contacts to you. This was and still is incredibly helpful especially for young people just starting out in life who need to build up networks (of all ... kinds) very quickly.

The limited space available in a tweet ensured that everyone was capped at the same minimal level of effort, so there was little or no expectation that you had to put a lot of work or thought or polish into what you were saying - rawness and immediacy were prioritized over polish. Quantity finally had a slight edge over quality, because everything was tinged with the quality of "novelty" at the time.

Twitter did two things. Removal of media gate keepers. No longer did politicians, athletes, actors, other notables have their msg filtered by media outlets. Before you had to rely on whatever edited quote a newspaper deemed worthy of providing to you. Major shift in control.

The other was the rise of the quick rebuttal. No longer have to have things fact checked.

Original Twitter, updating from SMS was referred to as the "realtime web".

The fact that someone could share some news immediately from sms (hence the length limitation) before smartphones were common place was a genuine novelty.

Mozilla and Firefox. When I was shipping the first versions of those two browsers, I can't tell you how many people said "why do we need a new browser when IE 6 is plenty good" and much of that sentiment came from friends in the industry, not even typical consumers who were even less interested. Then we popularized tabbed browsing, integrated search, pop-up blocking, browser extensions, intelligent addressing, and a whole lot more through compelling extensions. That led to 25% market share for the Web platform in about 5 years. Not bad for a few kids doing after hours work as AOL wound down the Netscape operation after settling their civil suit with MS in 2002.

Great work. How would you disrupt the browser industry today?

Dropbox is the classic example, where a commenter on this very website wrote:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

and then went on to say

> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Today, Dropbox is a public company. Its net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $540M, a 47% increase year-over-year. I think that should count as successful.

The Launch HN for Dropbox, such as it was at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Not only that, but it was the first YC company to go public. That said, their performance post-IPO leaves a lot to be desired.

To be fair, it seems like most IPOs these days are simply a way for founders and investors to cash out after 15 years.

"Developer of the Laser Calls It 'A Solution Seeking A Problem'" (New York Times, May 1964) https://web.archive.org/web/20221212154109/https://www.nytim...

Not exactly what you are asking, but the thing that immediately jumped into my mind was: post-it notes. A 3M scientist, trying to improve adhesiveness, came across a property that caused stickiness with poor adhesiveness. Not exactly what he was tasked to invent.

Years passed. Until another 3M scientist, who was struggling with the bookmarks he put in the choir hymnals continuously falling out, thought about his colleague's odd sticky non-adhesive thingamajig. And voila! Post-its were born.

Microsoft Word. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word

> It was not initially popular, since its user interface was different from the leading word processor at the time, WordStar.[20] However, Microsoft steadily improved the product, releasing versions 2.0 through 5.0 over the next six years. ... The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers.[13]

The worldwide Web or the information super highway (at the names)

The Information Superhighway was considered more "dangerous" than "meh" as soon as the project got deeper into implementation, ultimately leading to its designer exile to the USA where Al Gore picked the term : ^ )

Dropbox

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