41–50 of 1001 posts
In the '90s I was convinced that basically everything with a name attached to it was going to be built around PowerPC and MIPS processors. When StrongARM went to Intel, I figured ARM was basically dead outside of controller/coprocessor/offload applications and expected Pentium II/III to suffer a similar fate to Pentium Pro.
Semantic ontologies that would totally change the nature of search.
The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
X3D - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D Rationale: It was the 1990s, VRML flew but didn't quite make it. 3D hardware acceleration had arrived, gaming was exploding, Descent and Quake had proven complex worlds and freedom of movement were possible on commodity hardware, and talk of buffering 3D content in video streams seemed to make perfect sense for next generation passive entertainment. Product placements, architect…
Kinect - such a human interface that doesn't require direct integration with hardware or technical knowledge or buttons, and a lot of fun in the games I played. But it failed.
I expected PCs to be in every home pretty much forever. Now a lot of non-tech people prefer phones and tablets.
I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial propos…