51–60 of 1001 posts
Those VR glasses for augmented reality, the google glasses... but nope.
Palm/HP/LG WebOS - JavaScript based os a few years ahead of it's time in mobile form.
Nanotubes. Seemed like it was all upside, the stuff we were going to be making starships out of.
I expected PCs to be in every home pretty much forever. Now a lot of non-tech people prefer phones and tablets.
I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable decision.
But beyond this, I don't really understand why it didn't catch on. The first time I tried it I was hooked simply due to the issue of presence. Though perhaps the fact I ended up never purchasing a device answers my own question -- I had no interest in a Facebook driven platform, and the price point to get involved with VR for things like the Vive did not mesh well with the availability of software, as well as the fact that hardware tends to rapidly iterate.
The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…
Well, what are you looking for? There's lots of tech developments happening in the bitcoin space, from mimblewimble to lightning to confidential assets & zero knowledge proofs. But it sounds like none of this is what you had in mind?