X still doesn't have functional search.
What are other great examples of hardware or software products that succeeded despite missing seemingly "table stakes" features at first / for a while?
Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42257324
Early Facebook had no provision for sharing different things with different people
Early HTML had (and current HTML still has) hyperlinks to nowhere
Early Oracle would occasionally lose your data
Early Macs and Windows* lacked preemptive multiprocessing
Early Unix made no provision to keep a process from overwriting its own code
Early business computers didn't process lowercase alphabetics; early scientific computers didn't process alphabetics at all.
Early desk calculators would just go into an infinite loop if you were foolish enough to divide by 0
Early telephone calls had to be manually routed
Early steam engines were only economically feasible because the mines they were pumping out were coal mines
Early saddles didn't have stirrups
Early alphabets didn't have vowels
etc, etc
* there was even folk wisdom at the time that any sub-3.0 microsoft product was bound to be woefully lacking in at least one area
FWIW, having spent nearly 4 decades in tech, I agree with Buchheit.
EDIT: there may also be relevant case studies in Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (1962) and Moore, Crossing the Chasm (1991)
[in the language of the latter: great products are for the innovators and early adopters market segments; good products are for the early majority and lagging adopter segments]