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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I never thought game subscription would take of. The entire concept is stupid to me. Pay per month to *acces selected games but not own them? Take into accoumt 90% of people will play at most 25% of the catalogue. Let’s do some math if PS Plus Essentials, where you get 2-4 random titles per month is taken, which costs 9€ per month which if you play down to 25% of the catalogue goes up to 36€ per month (that is you basicly pay 36€ to play that single game which was chosen at random and you still don’t own). For that ammount of money I can buy a REAL game I OWN or 5 good games on Steam Sale or GOG.
Still I guess if it sounds good people will smoke it.
To be clear these statistics are purly “Trust me bro” but I doubt someone will play Core Keeper, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and NFS: Unbound all in one month enough that it makes sense, and if you can more power to you, but I know those are not most people. Most people play Minecraft or Elder Scrolls or COD or GT etc.
Still feel free to express yours opinion.
I’m generally against the rise of subscriptions in every service on the Internet, but I did actually benefit from game pass for a couple years. Access to the library meant I could try a lot of games I otherwise probably would not have played. I was only out the time I spent downloading and playing them if I didn’t like them- no need to deal with returns or resale, which is especially difficult/restrictive for digital purchases.
I can’t find what the original price for game pass was, but I’ll do the break-even math for the current price: It looks like the highest tier game pass subscription today is ~$30/mo. Multiply by 12 months, that’s $360/yr. With games typically costing $60-70, $360/yr divided by $60 is 6 games/yr.
One would need to play > 6 new games each year to save money with xbox game pass. I think that number is pretty achievable for the average gamer, but I’d be curious to see some statistics about average game consumption.
I think what drives it is probably the general prices of games on consoles. The prices just don’t really drop from the launch price of $60+ (plus indies are far less prevalent) so the math starts mathing up pretty quickly, especially if you’re one to sell your console when you stop using it
For sure. I feel like holding the launch price forever has been more of a recent development (some time in the last several years, ignoring nintendo) and it seems to be happening on pc too. At least on pc, we usually get a couple decent sales every year and lots of indie content.
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? "
Yes. This is also similar to Strugatsky brothers’ fiction where people of the future seem like a society of scientific workers.
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.
My parents made us a Betamax household well into the mid 90s; always relegated to the small shitty section of the video rental store.
In the 2000s I wanted to avoid another format pushed by Sony, so I went with HD-DVD over Bluray… sigh. I even got the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD drive.
This was my biggest miss too. The porn industry had predicted the winner in all of the previous format wars, so when it settled on HD-DVD I thought that was the end of it.
My uncle got an Xbox 360 specifically because Smallville was coming out on hddvd instead of Bluray. He could never find that hd dvd drive until the format war was over, and I ended up with the 360.
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.
Even after seeing it, I was sure the iphone would fail. I thought, “Why would anyone use a crappy computer on a tiny screen instead of a laptop or desktop?”
The iPod did well. Your point?
The iPod did well.
“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
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.
…yeah, i initally considered the `web an also-ran gopher knockoff, too…
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.
I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.
Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.
Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.
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.
Yeah, I thought about that. I should look into this, thanks! :)
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.
It’s still hanging
Speaking of carbon, did scientists give up on lengthening carbon nanotubes at some point? They were supposed to be a miracle material as well.
Probably still a thing. You can’t really put more surface in a box. Will just take a bit longer, foundational research and all.
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.
In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.
I mean you’re not wrong, for some people in some cases. But it’s not so easy to teach yourself how to learn, nor why to learn it.
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.
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)
There was some similar project that the UK was going to do, run an HVDC submarine line down from the UK to Africa.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco–UK_Power_Project
The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project is a proposal to create 11.5 GW of renewable generation, 22.5 GWh of battery storage and a 3.6 GW high-voltage direct current interconnector to carry solar and wind-generated electricity from Morocco to the United Kingdom.[1][2][3][4] Morocco has been hailed as a potential key power generator for Europe as the continent looks to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.[5]
If built, the 4,000 km (2,500 miles) cable would be the world’s longest undersea power cable, and would supply up to 8% of the UK’s electricity consumption.[6][7][8] The project was projected to be operational within a decade.[9][10] The proposal was rejected by the UK government in June 2025.
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.
Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens
I remember thinking similarly. Specifically “well duh you’ll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones” except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)
