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 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.
I thought touchscreens would never work out. But here we are in a generation where have touchscreens in cars too.
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
…yeah, i initally considered the `web an also-ran gopher knockoff, too…
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.
“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 bought and moved like 1 in late 2013 when it spiked just to play with it and see how it worked, out of curiosity about the tech. (And soon after, mined Dogecoin on Reddit when it started, and we all began tipping like crazy because it was fun and funny.) I made a few bucks off the BTC and kinda regretted not holding it longer. Then cut to a decade later… Sheesh. I may be more sour on the tech now, but damn I’m not so crazy as to not regret selling it.
I let ~20 of them disappear after hearing about the first domino pizza being bought with them for 600 some odd
I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they’d fail like bulldozer
Before it launched I thought Bulldozer would be good. I even had an FX-8350, and in hindsight I’m not sure it was even an upgrade from the Phenom II X4 955 black edition that I had before
The Wii. Previous gen console specs. Silly gimmick controller. Best selling peripheral was a step.
Most popular shit in the history of everything.
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)
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
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.
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 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.
Not me but my dad. He was friends with a guy who was loosely related to someone relatively high up at Google when they first went public. His friend offered him 500 shares at 50¢ a pop. His life right now would have been wildly different.
Did you take share dilution into account? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_dilution
Why would I? Ruins the story ;)
You were pretty correct about Apple, it got saved by Microsoft who kept it alive to skirt monopoly laws.
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.
Never stopped hating being forced to use that piece of monopolistic trash ever since I was on dialup when HL2 released. I buy everything I can on GOG.
I especially resent how closed off the Steam Workshop has made the mod ecosystem for a lot of games.
There are dozens of us who still aren’t convinced.
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)
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
