Technology

I thought VR would be more widespread by now.

And it's probably because of the two next things I thought as well.

I thought it would be cheaper and easier to do by now. More like a Google Glass kind of thing. But we're still playing 4 figures for dedicated massive headsets to strap to our heads. No wonder it didn't take off.

And I mean dedicated like the HTC Vive. Not the Quest.

if I had been in the stock market in the 90s I would've gotten very rich then lost it all on iomega

You were pretty correct about Apple, it got saved by Microsoft who kept it alive to skirt monopoly laws.

"This internet stuff is useless" (me, around 1994). Yeah, I'm a visionary.

I don't know if I can count this as mine, but I certainly didn't disagree with predictions of others around 1990 or so that the smart home would be the future. The idea was that you'd have a central home computer and it would interface with all sorts of other systems and basically control the house.

While there are various systems for home automation, things like Home Assistant or OpenHAB, and some people use them, and I've used some technology that were expected to be part of this myself, like X10 for device control over power circuits, the vision of a heavily-automated, centrally-controlled home never made it to become the normal. I think that the most-widely-deployed piece of home automation that has shown up since then is maybe the smart thermostat, which isn't generally hooked into some central home computer.

I also fell for the Nintendo 3DS hype! I was 12 years old at the time, and I really believed the glassless 3D would be a killer feature and the next big thing in gaming, and I spent six months leading up to the launch date washing cars and doing odd jobs to scrape enough money together to buy it on day one.

I did still love the device and kept it for a long time, but the 3D was a gimmick and got switched off fast. I was sad to have spent all that time and effort saving money, only for the price to plummet soon after launch, but it taught me a good lesson :)

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.

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.

I really thought UMPCs would have taken off

Minidiscs would endure and crypto would fail.....I still believe both will bw true in the end....

I remember I wasn't impressed with smartphones when they first appeared. Phones were already everywhere and gimmicky variations were appearing all the time. The Internet and social media were much less popular and to use them you generally wanted to be sat down at a desk. At the time it really felt like anyone with a fancy phone was just going to use them for calls and text and nothing else.