I think that it’s interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.
Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn’t make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn’t pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn’t or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.
Four from me:
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My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of
lynxon a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then. -
In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn’t think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.
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When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it’s safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.
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After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering
youtube-dlmuch less useful, theyt-dlpproject came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn’t tolerate this — it seems to me to have all the drawbacks ofyoutube-dlfrom their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn’t be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven’t throttled or blocked it.
Anyone else have some of their own that they’d like to share?
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That texting would be so popular. Coming from pagers to actual cell phones and being able to hear people talk anywhere was amazing. Going back to text messages seemed counterintuitive.
I wrote a term paper once about how twitter would enable citizen journalism and lead to a more informed public and a healthier, more direct democracy. I got an A.
I was a pretty huge fan of Zune and I still miss it.
The Wii. Previous gen console specs. Silly gimmick controller. Best selling peripheral was a step.
Most popular shit in the history of everything.
When the 3DS came out I was sure it would be a stepping stone to 3D TVs that didn’t require glasses.
3D TVs basically died out by now.
That’s an inherent limitation of that sort of technology. It can only work for 1 pair of eyes.
that’s ok, i only have one pair.
I hate microsoft but really liked windows phone and cortana. Something about tiles made a lot of sense and the keyboard was clean af.
I am very sure they were the first to have url bar above the keyboard in their browser WHICH WAS VERY HELPFUL BECAUSE YOUR FINGERS ARE ALREADY AT THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE PHONE LIKE OMFG.
like there was so many little things they did that just worked and worked well. rip windows phone, i will tell my grandkids about you.
I really wanted the Linux/Qt/Jolla phone to happen. They still haven’t refunded the other half of my deposit…
I thought Apple/most smartphones would never move to USB-C, or away from proprietary chargers. Pleasantly surprised - thank you EU.
I thought wireless controllers were going to be a fad, or at least garbage in their reliability/connection strength.
I thought VR was finally going to take off as the next major gaming experience when the Vive came out. Unfortunately it remains niche.
I thought Linux was going to be unusable for gaming/mainstream use cases for much longer, but Valve has made huge strides on that with Proton, and OSS devs making things like Heroic for other stores has been awesome. Also shoutout to KDE for, well, everything. Krita, KDE connect, Plasma. LibreOffice has also come a very long way.
I also thought we’d never get another steam controller. Also pleasantly surprised.
“Nintendo should admit defeat and focus on making games for other platforms and mobile devices.” - Me, after the Wii U and a little before the Switch launched.
“No parent is going to buy a Wii because of the stupid name” -me, 2005
“Revolution” was a better name.
I thought the switch was gonna end up with the same depressing library as the 3DS, if that’s any consolation.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
- Fire Emblem: Awakening
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
- Shovel Knight
- Super Mario 3D Land
- Pushmo
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D
I guess we can’t be friends. ☹️
I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.
“Bitcoin will never take”. I mined a few at the very beginning when it was easy, out of curiosity, and didn’t bother backing up because it was useless anyway. Ahem.
I mined a bit too. Got almost 2 bitcoin in 2 weeks. Figured it was a pyramid scheme, went back to running folding@home. Forgot my wallet passphrase.
I thought blu-ray would supplant DVD-RW for storing and transferring data, including for buying software. Much like DVD replaced CD, which replaced diskettes. Turns out both were replaced by cloud and streaming, with a short interlude for USB sticks.
Al still have their niches, but buying software and storing data is pretty much all online now.
I thought the advent of 4k TVs would push people over to BluRay because with the codecs available a decade ago you needed a good 40mbit+ for a single 4k stream. Turns out I picked the wrong component of streaming to be the thing that would push people back to physical media.
Also all of that broadband investment that was talked about a decade+ ago actually turned into broadband improvements, so now even my in-laws who live on 8 acres in the sticks outside of a tiny town of 400 or so residents have gigabit FTTH service
It doesn’t matter how good is internet connection nowadays, the source in the server is still encoded losing some quality.
Tried to watch Batman Begins in HBO Max, despite being offered as 4K UHD, the loss of information was noticeable on my OLED tv, specially the blacks (as you know, there is almost no black colour in Batman /s).
A friend of mine lend me his Nolan’s Batman trilogy on BR 4K UHD and it was like night and day.
Since the lbs I’m buying physical for movies that I like the most and want to watch them in the highest quality possible.
When Steam first appeared (and was required to play Half-Life 2 IIRC), I thought that was a ridiculous idea to have a middle man to play a game. Well, what do I know, everyone loves Steam now (yet hates on other launchers).
I get it and was very skeptical at the time… But soon after I began to believe they’d stick around, and my annoyance at installing through multiple discs (and also putting discs in the tray to play a game) won out.
There are dozens of us who still aren’t convinced.
Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.
Speaking of carbon, did scientists give up on lengthening carbon nanotubes at some point? They were supposed to be a miracle material as well.
I thought people would learn how to use computers.
It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.
Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.
“What’s a computer?”
"Why doesn’t the touchscreen work? "
Around 2009 I predicted that very soon, Linux smartphones you can plug into a docking station to use as a desktop PC would become the standard consumer computing device.
It’s so obvious, I wish they had caught on! I remember there was a failed Ubuntu phone Kickstarter for exactly this…
Samsung even had a feature in their phones copying this. Looks like its still present but was left to rot though
Randomly tripped across this over NYE. Was hoping to share something on a Samsung TV at a cabin and when it synced it was showing a full desktop I could navigate using my screen as a mousepad and keyboard. Blew my mind.
I thought drones were just going to be a fad, but they’ve become huge, especially in terms of government and corporate surveillance. I should have realized the way it was going when America started using them militarily. American military inventions almost always end up becoming popular consumer products/applications.
They’ve not even started for most of the domestic and consumer uses. They’re only just scratching the surface of commercial and military application.
In 30 years people will have subscriptions to a drone service that will take x# of packages for them within their city/geography per month/year with weight tiers. Etc. errands and single use car trips and commercial trips in the last mile will drastically decrease.
The skies will never be as they are again. The generation growing up right now will be the last to have been able to look up at the vast expanse without some buzzing. Whirring distraction.
Of all things, the war in Ukraine will probably be the thing that sets the stage for what our drone-filled future might look like. Not something I would’ve predicted 5 years ago!
This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.
This is what present day warfare looks like now, its all flying buzzing drones attacking people and other drones. And what happens after the peace treaties are signed? A ton of that engineering and tooling for making this tech will get refocused into consumer and commercial products.
Autonomous tractors are already commercial products, reducing the number of people needed to complete a task on a farm. Many new non-autonomous tractors these days already have whats effectively cruise control on steroids, where the tractor will follow a predetermined path with the driver just sitting in the cab to monitor and take over if anything happens. And of course at home the robot vacuum cleaners are available from many brands. I’ve even seen one of those floor mopping machines adapted to run autonomously at my local Menards (which shocked me as I live in a pretty small town with about as low of a cost of living as it gets really) and while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray. I saw a security robot making the rounds at a convention center in Florida while on a business trip. A Coworker told me about a robot working at a hotel he stayed at in San Francisco which would transport ordered/requested items to guests’ rooms. And there’s those dog sized food delivery robots in many cities. The more I think about it, wheeled and legged robots are probably what we will see a lot more of, since many already do exist in real commercial applications, and the legal, logistical and ethical barriers to their integration into our lives is much lower than flying robots.
