Ask HN: Why do I always see “X has shut down”, but have never heard of X? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do I always see “X has shut down”, but have never heard of X?

16 pointsDiabloD315 comments

Over the past 2 years I've seen maybe a hundred "X has shut down" postings, but many of them I have never heard of, and some of them looked like a company I would have liked to have done business with.

So, what gives? Do companies just not advertise themselves enough?

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They failed to reach you and that's part of the reason why they shut down.

For a lot of the companies I see, it's not that they don't advertise enough... It's that they're selling a solution to a problem that nobody is rushing to solve.

Other factors come in of course, such as: bad advertising, bad product, poor social media representation, bad SEO, bad service, bad management, bad whatever.

From my perspective though, I just see lots of companies selling solutions to problems I never thought of looking for a solution to. It takes some really, really good advertising and a good product to overtake that burden.

Based on the title I arrived here to explain how the X display server works :P

For the simple reason that the more successful a company is, the more likely you are to have heard of them. These are the companies that never gained traction.

It'd be nice if there was a "Startup Portfolio" that's linked on HN which is basically a long list of startups that have been endorsed or blessed or backed by HN founders, supporters or alum. Each company could get 1 paragraph to describe their company and their current objectives. Might be interesting to just browse the list on occasion.

That would be nice. And maybe companies owned by high karma count HN users (cough cough)

There are also lots of multi million or multi billion dollar successful businesses that you have never heard of.

I think it is more about your bandwidth as a mere mortal. Even with the number of advertising messages laid on us per day, there is no way we can know about every business that may be relevant to us. There is only so many Kb/s that can enter our brains!

Who cares about X when there is Y?

What's X? Never heard of it.

X is a windowing server and that shuts down all the time.

(Back in the day I had a three-year X session, and that was on an AIX RS-6000; couldn't hardly believe it.)

As a former X user, that's absolutely amazing, but then I realized you're on AIX. IBM loves doing the impossible regularly.

Compiling for it was such a royal pain :(

Made a great footrest, though. AND 128M OF RAM HOLY COW.

Ah, those were the days.

You don't need to be magnificent and newsworthy to be successful as a business either. You can be quietly successful as well.

There is this fetish in the valley with external validation. Often times, even the public, sluttiest startups end up touting, over-promising and subsequently under-delivering.

Same here. :-)

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