
Ask HN: What major trend in tech were you wrong about? - jppope
I just took a moment to pause today and realized how much things have changed in the past decade... and how wrong I was about some trends didn&#x27;t take off and others did (E.G. I thought we would see a major movement into biotech after theranos &#x2F; 23andMe captured so much spotlight... yes I was super wrong).<p>What tech trend were you sure about and why do you think it didn&#x27;t pan out?
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csense
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.

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lukaszkups
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
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.

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mtmail
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
That's pretty interesting because I would argue you got the trend right just
not the method.

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sloaken
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

~~~
flukus
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
Number of required DBAs seems to correlate with the number of installed Oracle
databases.

------
tropo
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.

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znpy
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.

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bkohlmann
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.

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sergiotapia
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
Tell me more about elixir and OTP... they aren't currently on my radar...

~~~
0_gravitas
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.

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p0d
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.

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the_common_man
I thought Facebook was a passing fad.

~~~
jppope
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...

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w4tson
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

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pedro1976
\- 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

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billconan
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.

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firebones
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
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
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.

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superasn
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.

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brokenmachine
A recent one: phones with non-replaceable batteries.

I never thought consumers could be so shortsighted and wasteful.

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rwieruch
\- Windows Phone

