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

That texting would be so popular. Coming from pagers to actual cell phones and being able to hear people talk anywhere was amazing. Going back to text messages seemed counterintuitive.

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

Most popular shit in the history of everything.

“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.

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.

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 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.

When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”

I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.

And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.

I thought touchscreens would never work out. But here we are in a generation where have touchscreens in cars too.

Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens

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.

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

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.

Everything ? I though MS Office woukd fail becase no one will want to close source their data files, i was using an Amiga at the time at home and the file format was standard and you chose the app to use

It started there and just progressed, Apple was a big one, people won’t buy into their closed wall’d shenanigans. Wrong again.

Messaging, what a debacle that has turned into. I assumed the system would be standardised and the fight would be over the front end for interoperability, wrong again.

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.