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The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
Instagram. Sharing pictures and comenting on them, like Fotolog.com in the early 2000s, but more closed (it didn't want you to browse photos on mobile without the app)... yeah, revolutionary.
back when digital TV launched in the UK during late 1998, the major platofrm (Sky, ONdigital, Telewest and ntl) were all hyping up their interactive services.
Sky's service was called Open.... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open....) and you could order pizza, email, go shopping, dating, betting etc. Sky were so convinced it was going to be a money spinner they gave away all the boxes for free.
The underlying technology was also used to add interactively to TV shows. For example you could choose the camera angle in some football games and the BBC made a documentary about dinosaurs that worked like a multimedia CD-ROM.
Most of these services lasted less than five years, the services were sluggish, the proprietary tech didn't help and in any case the web did it better.
I didn't think the shopping/commercial side would succeed, but I was convinced there would be a huge market for interactive TV. Nope, there wasn't.
3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…
I would have expected robots and automation technologies that replace human workers to come much faster to everyday life. Of course this is happening in some areas, but not nearly as much as it could happen. Just one example: It's easy to imagine running a shop that works with little to no workers. The closest thing that exists are these self-checkout cashiers, but even these aren't that prevalent, the norm is still…
- they are very expensive in relation to consumer income
- they are complex to program
- generally specialized: more or less general purpose frames (like your typical 5 axis arm) with special single-purpose tools mounted to them
- safety architecture is generally: total enclosure, no human access/interaction during operation, if not totally enclosed usually with light curtains or very stringent requirements.
A general-purpose helper bot looks like a completely different beast from this angle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second Life comes close. I never got the value proposition of Second Life. It wasn't game-y enough to be a game and, for me at least, it didn't really add much over more "traditional" collaboration/communication/socialising methods like text and video chat, social networks, twitter etc.
It's a lot closer to facebook than a game. It's basically a building game.
The idea isn’t terrible, but the implementation had some horrific flaws, and Linden Labs became notorious for infuriating users.
SL might have taken off if both servers and clients were fully open-sourced, and LL had concentrated on building a global system for connecting open servers together.
I strongly suspect someone will rediscover the idea 5-10 years from now, do it properly, and replace today’s web.
The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
YouTube - it didn't look profitable and I thought they'd go out of business
Sometimes I think the only thing keeping Youtube alive as a Google product is that the internet would rip them to shreds if they were to shut it down.
I bought one used just three months after rollout - should have seen this as a red flag back then.
The user experience was great - for the first 30 minutes. After that the pain related to holding the hand in the air was becoming to annoying to ignore.
Switching between this and the mouse/touchpad proved to be a great optimum though.
Anyway I successfully used it for my master's thesis to precisely place a few microphones in space, but after that I stopped using it altogether - too few useful applications to bother.