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:

  • My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of lynx on 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.

  • 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.

  • After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering youtube-dl much less useful, the yt-dlp project 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 of youtube-dl from 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?

  • mech@feddit.orgEnglish
    33·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • Janx@piefed.socialEnglish
      17·
      3 days ago

      It’s so obvious, I wish they had caught on! I remember there was a failed Ubuntu phone Kickstarter for exactly this…

    • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
      9·
      3 days ago

      And I can’t really understand why we aren’t there yet. Do we really need 8 cores to phone and read IMs? And isn’t there an OS that works both on mobile and desktop? I’m baffled.

      • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        I still mourn the loss of the timeline where the Atrix was successful. Our phones are every bit powerful enough for 95% of the computing most of us do, so why can’t we just drop them in a slot and have them be a laptop?

    • DosDude@retrolemmy.comEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      Dock it in a laptop shell. And then the phone being the touchpad for the mouse. This was my prediction too. I’m still hoping.

      • notthebees@reddthat.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Quite a few phones have desktop modes now, and they work alright. I wish my phone had it. My iphone 16 supports USB dp alt mode but only a direct mirror.

    • notthebees@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      There’s a few Android phones that have it, old and new. I have an iPhone 16 at the moment and while it works with a dp-alt mode dock, it only mirrors the screen and nothing else. I think there’s some things you can do to trick the phone into enabling stage manager and other ipad features.

      • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        9 hours ago

        I’m still salty that Apple crooked my 6th gen iPad mini by not allowing Stage Manager on it to allow it to work with an external display. Like the iPhone, it just mirrors, which is bullshit. I don’t even care if it shuts off the built in screen because it can only run one display, I just wish it could be used as a portable computer.

        iPadOS 26 brought actual Stage Manager to it, but it’s a gimped version that still doesn’t work properly with an external display.

        As a result, I don’t really use my iPad these days.