Technology

In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment. Basically the opposite has happened.

I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.

I thought people would learn how to use computers.

It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.

Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.

Around 2009 I predicted that very soon, Linux smartphones you can plug into a docking station to use as a desktop PC would become the standard consumer computing device.

I thought drones were just going to be a fad, but they've become huge, especially in terms of government and corporate surveillance. I should have realized the way it was going when America started using them militarily. American military inventions almost always end up becoming popular consumer products/applications.

"Nintendo should admit defeat and focus on making games for other platforms and mobile devices." - Me, after the Wii U and a little before the Switch launched.

When Steam first appeared (and was required to play Half-Life 2 IIRC), I thought that was a ridiculous idea to have a middle man to play a game. Well, what do I know, everyone loves Steam now (yet hates on other launchers).

When the 3DS came out I was sure it would be a stepping stone to 3D TVs that didn't require glasses.

3D TVs basically died out by now.

In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.

I thought Apple/most smartphones would never move to USB-C, or away from proprietary chargers. Pleasantly surprised - thank you EU.

I thought wireless controllers were going to be a fad, or at least garbage in their reliability/connection strength.

I thought VR was finally going to take off as the next major gaming experience when the Vive came out. Unfortunately it remains niche.

I thought Linux was going to be unusable for gaming/mainstream use cases for much longer, but Valve has made huge strides on that with Proton, and OSS devs making things like Heroic for other stores has been awesome. Also shoutout to KDE for, well, everything. Krita, KDE connect, Plasma. LibreOffice has also come a very long way.

I also thought we’d never get another steam controller. Also pleasantly surprised.

I wrote a term paper once about how twitter would enable citizen journalism and lead to a more informed public and a healthier, more direct democracy. I got an A.

I was a pretty huge fan of Zune and I still miss it.

The Wii. Previous gen console specs. Silly gimmick controller. Best selling peripheral was a step.

Most popular shit in the history of everything.

I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.

When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn't see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.

Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.

Tbh I personally still don't see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

I thought cameras on phones were a gimmick. To be fair, they were pretty low quality back then but I still use it to remind myself not to be too overconfident because boy was I wrong.

Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.

"Bitcoin will never take". I mined a few at the very beginning when it was easy, out of curiosity, and didn't bother backing up because it was useless anyway. Ahem.

Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens

I hate microsoft but really liked windows phone and cortana. Something about tiles made a lot of sense and the keyboard was clean af.

I am very sure they were the first to have url bar above the keyboard in their browser WHICH WAS VERY HELPFUL BECAUSE YOUR FINGERS ARE ALREADY AT THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE PHONE LIKE OMFG.

like there was so many little things they did that just worked and worked well. rip windows phone, i will tell my grandkids about you.

In the late 90s I saw a piece demonstrating an optical 3d storage system that had a capacity about an order of magnitude greater than the at the time brand new HD DVD and Bluray discs. I assumed this clearly superior format that already had a working demo would obviously kill other optical media. Turns out nobody could figure out how to manufacture one at a price anybody was willing to spend.

I never thought game subscription would take of. The entire concept is stupid to me. Pay per month to *acces selected games but not own them? Take into accoumt 90% of people will play at most 25% of the catalogue. Let's do some math if PS Plus Essentials, where you get 2-4 random titles per month is taken, which costs 9€ per month which if you play down to 25% of the catalogue goes up to 36€ per month (that is you basicly pay 36€ to play that single game which was chosen at random and you still don't own). For that ammount of money I can buy a REAL game I OWN or 5 good games on Steam Sale or GOG.

Still I guess if it sounds good people will smoke it.

To be clear these statistics are purly "Trust me bro" but I doubt someone will play Core Keeper, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and NFS: Unbound all in one month enough that it makes sense, and if you can more power to you, but I know those are not most people. Most people play Minecraft or Elder Scrolls or COD or GT etc.

Still feel free to express yours opinion.

Having been on a few Segway tours I was surprised when they stopped making them. Easy to learn, fun to ride. Eventually they will age out and be gone. I wouldn't buy one for myself to have at home, but for whizzing around sightseeing when on holiday they're great.

I thought people would miss the keyboard on smartphones. Turns out we are a small minority

I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they'd fail like bulldozer

"This bitcoin thing is too niche and low value to be worth figuring out"

For reference, the first generation of IPhone actually preceded the IPod Touch, but the Touch reached my friend group first. Thus my reaction when I first heard of the IPhone was more or less,

"The IPod Touch is a gimmick, and now they want to make it your phone? Why the hell would anyone want a touchscreen phone in your pocket? Touchscreens are finnicky at the best of times, break at the slightest provocation, and a whole computer in your pocket would cost an absolute fortune. There's nothing wrong about just carrying an Mp3 player and phone separate in your pocket; this is just Apple selling an overpriced toy to their fanboys. Touch-screen computer-phones will never take off."

Boy do I feel like an idiot now.

I thought blu-ray would supplant DVD-RW for storing and transferring data, including for buying software. Much like DVD replaced CD, which replaced diskettes. Turns out both were replaced by cloud and streaming, with a short interlude for USB sticks.

Al still have their niches, but buying software and storing data is pretty much all online now.

It's crazy to think this now (since I'm so heavily into free software) but I actively chose a Windows Phone for my first smartphone, and thought it would take over the market from iOS and Android.

To be fair, it did have some cool features: it let you aggregate all the different ways of contacting people into one interface (the dream of many a tech person since the beginning of time!), it had a connection with facebook so you could see status updates/photos from your friends (in the contacts app of all places!), and I thought the live tiles and design language were really cool.

Despite even my hatred of Microsoft, I still have fond memories of that phone.

I thought the iPad being just a giant iPhone was stupid and it wouldn’t catch on. Years on I use an iPad to read comic books in bed, though I guess tablets as a whole are kind of niche and not great as a productivity tool due to mobile OSs holding them back.

My parents made us a Betamax household well into the mid 90s; always relegated to the small shitty section of the video rental store.

In the 2000s I wanted to avoid another format pushed by Sony, so I went with HD-DVD over Bluray... sigh. I even got the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD drive.

Pessimistically I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now.

I also felt pretty sure that some kind of massive CRISPR/Cas9 catastrophe was bound to occur by now.

Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that's stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.

I never thought Twitter was gonna go anywhere. 140 character post limit? That's fuckin' stupid.

At least I was half right: 140 characters was stupid. So they increased it to 280.

But I also didn't predict it would lead to the US going full nazi.