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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You were pretty correct about Apple, it got saved by Microsoft who kept it alive to skirt monopoly laws.
I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.
When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn’t see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.
Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.
Tbh I personally still don’t see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.
except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.
The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”
Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot
Yeah, I think tablets are cool, but if they were full-fledged Windows/Linux computers with mobile app compatibility, they’d be absolutely incredible.
You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.
I remember I wasn’t impressed with smartphones when they first appeared. Phones were already everywhere and gimmicky variations were appearing all the time. The Internet and social media were much less popular and to use them you generally wanted to be sat down at a desk. At the time it really felt like anyone with a fancy phone was just going to use them for calls and text and nothing else.
Everything ? I though MS Office woukd fail becase no one will want to close source their data files, i was using an Amiga at the time at home and the file format was standard and you chose the app to use
It started there and just progressed, Apple was a big one, people won’t buy into their closed wall’d shenanigans. Wrong again.
Messaging, what a debacle that has turned into. I assumed the system would be standardised and the fight would be over the front end for interoperability, wrong again.
When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”
I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.
And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.
Desertec failed due to geopolitical considerations (basically the Europeans didn’t want to have their next energy sourced from a region outside their control and therefore stopped funding the project)
…yeah, i initally considered the `web an also-ran gopher knockoff, too…
Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that’s stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.
Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to … and evade sanctions?
So, if you are born with an unfortunate citizenship and location, you do need these things exactly. Bitcoin is one tech-bro thing I worship. It fulfills a purpose. The world would be worse without it.
I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.
That’s because you live in a first world country and think, apparently, that everyone does or that those who don’t have only themselves to blame.
I just thought it wouldn’t go anywhere. Financially I made the right choice by never investing. No matter how much money you could have made in retrospect, the correct choice is to make the decision based on sound financial strategies. All the value remains speculation
I thought you’d have to go into a physical store, connect your MP3 player to a special computer, and download music there. I didn’t anticipate iTunes.
Neither did Sony, lol.
if I had been in the stock market in the 90s I would’ve gotten very rich then lost it all on iomega
I never thought Twitter was gonna go anywhere. 140 character post limit? That’s fuckin’ stupid.
At least I was half right: 140 characters was stupid. So they increased it to 280.
But I also didn’t predict it would lead to the US going full nazi.
I thought people would miss the keyboard on smartphones. Turns out we are a small minority
There are some products out there that do cater to people who want a physical keyboard on their smartphone today. It’s not the norm, but if you’re frustrated over it, it might work for you.
Amazon has a lot of portable Bluetooth keyboards that can basically collapse down into a pocket. Those are generally designed to be used at a table, though, not in a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard sense. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen a few of the latter that can clip to a phone, though.
I wish we’d still use them. Typing this on a Unihertz Titan 2.
I really thought UMPCs would have taken off
Context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC
An ultra-mobile PC,[1] or ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in Spring 2006. Sony had already made a first attempt in this direction in 2004 with its Vaio U series, which was only sold in Asia. UMPCs are generally smaller than subnotebooks, have a TFT display measuring (diagonally) about 12.7 to 17.8 centimetres (5.0 to 7.0 in), are operated like tablet PCs using a touchscreen or a stylus, and can also have a physical keyboard.
I thought touchscreens would never work out. But here we are in a generation where have touchscreens in cars too.
we are in a generation where have touchscreens in cars too
and I thought they would be outlawed for safety concerns, but even though the data is in they are dangerous, no one will end them.
Of course, firing most of the NHTSA prevented that.
Many kids now grow up only interacting with touchscreens and assume they’re the default. I genuinely wonder if the average 18 year old knows how to use a standard PC now, given they’d be interacting with almost exclusively with chromebooks, ipads and smartphones throughout school
My son was in kindergarten in 2005 - when touchscreens were still pretty rare - they gave him one to work with at school and were so jazzed about what he was doing they encouraged us to get one at home. I set him up with a keyboard instead, and he kicked butt with the keyboard just as well, if not better than, he did on the touch screen. Of course, iPod / iPads followed soon after - anybody can use a touch screen, it doesn’t hurt to know how to use the keys too.
I thought the iPad being just a giant iPhone was stupid and it wouldn’t catch on. Years on I use an iPad to read comic books in bed, though I guess tablets as a whole are kind of niche and not great as a productivity tool due to mobile OSs holding them back.
