Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power usage and cost as well.

Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.

Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013 but Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.

Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.

The IBM school's computer. Developed by IBM Hursley in 1967, it was years ahead in its design, display out to a television and storage on normal audio tape. Would have kick started an educational revolution if it had been launched beyond the 10 prototype machines.

Died due to legal wranglings about patents, iirc.

More here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061680

Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better.

Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving a trail of abandoned niches behind it.

Opa language 2012, it was a typed nextjs before its time.

http://opalang.org/

I think the market was still skeptical about nodejs on the server at the time but other than that I don’t really know why it didn’t take off

It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality, and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it.

[1] https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html

Non Daw. Its breaking up each function of the DAW into its own application gave a better experience in each of those functions, especially when you only needed that aspect, you were not working around everything else that the DAW offers. The integration between the various parts was not all that it could be but I think the idea has some real potential.

https://non.tuxfamily.org

Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.

Lotus Agenda, Ecco Pro and Chandler. 1980s AI-like human organization.

Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.

Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows! It was the Fuchsia of its time...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29

Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.

SMIL. Nothing comparable for seamless media stream composition, 20 years later.

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.

It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users.

It's too bad, because a drop in Windows replacement would be nice for all the people losing Windows 10 support right now.

On the other hand, I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project and compare it unfavorably to Linux, BSD, etc. Unix and its source code was pretty well publicly documented and understood for decades before those projects started, nothing like that ever really existed for Windows.

OS/2 my beloved.

Riak

Google Glass. Thanks society.

People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.