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Ask HN: What major trend in tech were you wrong about?

• the_common_man 7y ago
  I thought Facebook was a passing fad.
  • znpy 7y ago
    it is. it's just passing veeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy sloooooooowwwwllllllyyyyy....
  • jppope 7y ago
    Facebook was kind of funny when it came around- ostensibly it wasn't much different than other companies... only that the design was better at the time (I can still remember the hideous tangled mess that was myspace at the peak). I can see where you might have thought that though...
• tropo 7y ago
  I was wrong about the hardware that would bring Linux to the masses. I predicted something like Android, with Linux hidden deep inside, but thought it would be in the form of a game console connected to the TV. I thought that Sony and Sega and Nintendo would all follow Microsoft down the path of WebTV and more, ultimately killing the home desktop PC market.
• sloaken 7y ago
  I made some prediction about Databases not being much of a career field ... This all reminds me of the classic: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
  • jppope 7y ago
    I could see where you would argue that direction though... it makes sense that data persistence shouldn't be so differentiated. The power of brand and the paradigm I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • flukus 7y ago
    I'm not sure you were wrong, databases are here to stay but DBA's seem to be on the decline for various reasons.
    • prometheus76 7y ago
      Number of required DBAs seems to correlate with the number of installed Oracle databases.
• mtmail 7y ago
  I expected Segways to roam the streets as much as escooters do now. It was hyped as changing the way of human transport. The legal framework didn't exist yet, they are too expensive ($5000 USD), patents prevented competition, lots of marketing mistakes.
  • jppope 7y ago
    That's pretty interesting because I would argue you got the trend right just not the method.
  • p0d 7y ago
    People getting fat may have been a problem too :-) I was disappointed not to be allowed to segway at a holiday resort ad I was too heavy.
• znpy 7y ago
  vagrant and docker. I just didn't understand them at first, and wasn't interested either. next month I'll be joining a new company as a devops engineer. better late than never.
• sergiotapia 7y ago
  I was wrong about Docker. Thought it was a fad and something people cooked up to create jobs, but now it's the backbone of kubernetes and pretty much the way servers are provisioned and orchestrated. Won't make this same mistake with Elixir and OTP. I'm all in.
  • jppope 7y ago
    Tell me more about elixir and OTP... they aren't currently on my radar...
    • 0_gravitas 7y ago
      Assuming this wasn't asked sarcastically (the ellipses just make it seem so) Elixir: FP language with Ruby-esque syntax based off of Erlang and its VM BEAM. Part of the Elixir ecosystem is a webdev framework called Phoenix which is effectively Elixir's version of Rails. OTP: A set of libraries/utilities that are a part of the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem that help support building fault-tolerant and concurrent applications. It was originally designed for building telecom systems, hence the name Open Telecom Platform.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• pedro1976 7y ago
  - native mobile apps: I thought they would be replaced by simple webapps within a year, cause the costs of developing and maintaining at that time three different native apps appeared unreasonable. - app stores: the facts that they exist and people make money from it. From a user perspective ratings and stats seem to be of utmost importance
• rwieruch 7y ago
  - Windows Phone
• lukaszkups 7y ago
  Windows Phone - I was hoping that it's gonna stay with Android and iOS and gain more and more power on the mobile market Twitter competitors - I'm still hoping that one day there will be a nice replacement that doesn't mess with my timeline entries order & no ads (e.g. paid service) - there was couple approaches but none gain enough track. Mobile Phones - I was totally not interested in mobile phones 20+ years ago and thought that it won't gain enough market (temporary fashion) - I even said to myself that I will not have a mobile phone at all because I don't need it :) Modern JavaScript frameworks - I was so used to "get sh*t done" while using just raw JavaScript + jQuery + jQuery plugins that I thought that modern frameworks (such as Backbone at the time, Angular, React) will be also a temporary fashion which will end very quickly because it was making web development (in my opinion at the time) a slower process and people will go back to 'classic' webdev anyway soon.
  • jppope 7y ago
    gotta agree with you on the windows phone thing... circa 2012 the Nokia windows phones were really well built AND they had the easiest operating system to use at the time... windows had burned so many people by that point though that no one was having any of it.
• csense 7y ago
  I thought everybody would be using Bitcoins instead of dollars by now. What I missed is that (1) people don't care about whether the government can create money whenever it wants, they care more about money with stable value over time relative to the value of goods and wages, and (2) Ben Bernanke must have actually known how to do his job, because the huge post-2008 QE didn't cause massive, economy-destroying levels of inflation as I predicted it would. I literally learned this in Economics 101 in college, but I guess I had to see it for myself in order to believe it.
• p0d 7y ago
  Reversing your question, I remember someone showing me Google Search at an Open University Summer School around 2000. I thought it looked crap and Yahoo would reign. Ho hum.
• skaffolder 7y ago
  I'm betting on Kubernetes, Docker containers need an orchestrator, I didn't get it at the very beginning
• bkohlmann 7y ago
  I thought both private wealth management and residential real estate would be disrupted by digital technologies. The perception was that these have middle-men adding little value (i.e. just buy index funds! just use Zillow!) However, what I missed was that these jobs aren't about objective measures and efficiency. They both come down to trust between one human and another. While it still makes "rational" sense to use online tools, people are emotionally invested in their retirement accounts and the biggest purchase of their lives. They want to be made to feel good about it. At least half those roles are to be psychologists, which at this point, cannot be done by machines or algorithms.
• superasn 7y ago
  Magicleap for me. After seeing investors like Google pour billions of dollars in it I was pretty hopeful it would be as big of a game changer as iPhone was back in the day. Turned out it was just vaporware.
• billconan 7y ago
  I didn't think youtube would be big, because at the time, making video was expensive and difficult. I didn't think people would do it for free. Internet was slow too. Then, smartphone came out with internet and camera, making video became easy.
• firebones 7y ago
  My failures were ones of optimism about an open web. 1) When the semantic web didn't emerge, I got excited by embedded microformats as a way that many of the same benefits to be achieved in terms of computable knowledge. 2) I was always optimistic about P2P tech until I realized that we live in a world dominated by centralizing forces, both governmental and capitalistic. P2P can't exist in a recognizable form without some centralization that allows law enforcement or capitalistic gain from the service it attempts to provide. In both cases, I underestimated the control that governments could exert, and the power to capture dollars and mindshare that centralization due to corporate profits would entail. You see that in the web itself. The demise of RSS, the demise of the personal website, the reemergence of walled gardens. We're back to AOL, albeit with three or four players taking the role of one. What are hashtags but scaled up AOL keywords? What are Facebook groups but scaled up AOL forums? The web of those dreams will only exist in the margins and never at scale. Like ham radio or hobbies outside the mainstream that don't scale.
  • torified 7y ago
    I hope you're not right about that, but I fear you are. I also underestimated how much the average joe doesn't care about privacy. They'd give it up completely for a tiny bit of convenience. Nobody cares enough to desire a private/decentralized web.
    • 0_gravitas 7y ago
      Inklings do exist atm, the Dat protocol seems to be progressing steadily, and you do have things like Aether and Rotonde (I think that's what it's called, spelling is probably off). There is an interest, not a massive one (yet, at least), but there is an interest.
    • jppope 7y ago
      Also completely shocking to me.
• w4tson 7y ago
  React. I thought it was another flash in the pan library from Facebook. Likely to be never heard of again in 6 months. In my defense I’ve seen a lot UI Framework/libraries come and quickly disappear. But yeah it’s still going strong 6 years later. Which is about 100 years in JavaScript time
• brokenmachine 7y ago
  A recent one: phones with non-replaceable batteries. I never thought consumers could be so shortsighted and wasteful.