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?
It’s crazy to think this now (since I’m so heavily into free software) but I actively chose a Windows Phone for my first smartphone, and thought it would take over the market from iOS and Android.
To be fair, it did have some cool features: it let you aggregate all the different ways of contacting people into one interface (the dream of many a tech person since the beginning of time!), it had a connection with facebook so you could see status updates/photos from your friends (in the contacts app of all places!), and I thought the live tiles and design language were really cool.
Despite even my hatred of Microsoft, I still have fond memories of that phone.
Tiles and the metro interface in general were a really good idea. Kind of a shame everything’s consolidated around iPhone’s icon system instead. I remember being impressed with my mom’s, but it was such a flash in the pan and had so little 3rd party app support I never ended up getting one.
You could do something similar with widgets I suppose.
I still believe my windows phone had the best UI of any smartphone I’ve used
Well, on the flip side, my first smartphone was a Palm Prē, and I even installed the custom kernel to overclock it.
Still have it in a box somewhere too. That was such a great phone.
Now webOS is used by LG to spy on their smart TV customers.