
Ask HN: What future predictions of yours about tech turned out to be wrong? - jamil7
A few nights ago a friend of mine wanting to get into software development, asked me about where I thought the industry was heading. It got me thinking about the times myself or others have made wrong predictions about the industry. When were you wrong or what didn&#x27;t you expect HN?
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jones1618
My previous answer was more about tech in the broad sense.

Here are software tech trends that I thought were going to be HUGE but kind of
fizzled. Some I strongly believe are ripe for a comeback:

1\. (As before) I thought Java and Java Applets would be the GUI and OS for
everything.

2\. Object-oriented Programming. It has become fashionable to ridicule OOP but
I still think OOP (minus nearly useless inheritance) plus Design Patterns is
powerful, just not the grand solution to all problems.

3\. Knowledge Management Systems. There were supposed to be rules engines for
every domain of human knowledge that experts would fill with rules-of-thumb
and facts and voila! You'd have all-knowing oracles that could diagnose any
medical problem, etc. They still exist but proved expensive to build and
limited. IBM's Watson revived the idea for a while, though.

4\. Associative Operating Systems and Object Stores. File and folder OS'es
were supposed to be dead and gone by now, replaced with content-oriented OS'es
that retrieved information by their contents and by tags without regard for
location. Everything was supposed to be a series of linked and nested objects
so that if you updated a spreadsheet here, your related contract and
presentation would update automagically.

5\. Syndicated content and automatic agents. There was a time when RSS was
king and existed as a parallel API, if you will, to human-readable content.
Everything from your coffee pot to your favorite news site would have a feed
and your self-programmed agents would hunt and sift and deliver information to
your dashboard, handle routine transactions for you and, of course, broadcast
your status and thoughts to the world. Much of this, too, exists in scattered
patches but isn't the universal nerd nirvana we expected. Instead, people
relinquished rich, decentralized RSS feeds for controlled, predigested
Facebook, Twitter and Reddit feeds. Sad. APIs and automation are big as ever
but somehow never became tools of the people.

~~~
jamil7
Thanks for you insights. Number 5 I'm actually really sad about. I would love
the web to work this way today.

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jones1618
In 1994, I believed Java and Java Applets would replace Flash, desktop apps
and even operating systems. I knew we'd all have fiber to the home by 2005, at
the latest. I was sure that we'd all be using 360 panorama cameras and stereo
cameras. All pictures would be VR experiences. My worst prediction: I
fervently believed that all cars, electric or otherwise would be obsolete by
1995, replaced by on-demand pods on rails.

On the other hand, I knew CGI would revolutionize movies, 10 years before
Pixar. I showed my traditional animator friend early graphics and he laughed
at the idea. I adopted digital photography years before film cameras were
dead. I also bet my career on graphic user interfaces when text-mode MS-DOS
was the only serious operating system and later turned down a higher paying
client-server job to work on this crazy WWW thing.

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sharemywin
facebook...dumbest idea ever...besides...uber...

