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?
I like minidiscs, even if I’m too young to remember any popularity of them, I remember discs for Sony PSP which are similar in idea, an optical medium with protection like of diskettes.
And optical discs are not such a common good to think a protection case is too expensive or something. They get scratches.
But there’s another moment - optical discs also degrade with time faster than one would think when they were common. Mostly. Some are good.
About cryptocurrencies … I don’t believe that actually. That is, I believe many of them are scams. Or, one can say, very weird fundraising schemes for their creators. But there are uses, as one can easily feel when being in a sanctioned country.
Yea. The degredation of optical is a major reason its not viable for longterm data storage. But its something like 25 years. Considering people hold onto vinyl and and CDs for that long or longer. Along with the casing… MiniDiscs seemed like the next big step for audiophile. They had lossless recording and are to this day one of the best ways to record live audio.