The first one that really stuck in my mind is BetaMax and I suppose the collapse of Be, makers of the BeBox and BeOS, was the most discouraging... though I've seen a lot of other brands & companies I liked fail.
Ok so I also picked BeOS and that was my last bad tech pick. I picked ruby a bit before it utterly exploded, then Julia in 2014, then picked elixir in 2016. I also picked zig two years ago (I'm not a promiscuous language astronaut, these are the only languages I use that I don't have to like JS or python). I knew that a car hailing app would be the next big thing in 2009, and I knew Ben awad and Simone giertz before they got huge....
I just wish I could figure out how to monetize my prescience
From time to time I do spend time with Haiku in a VM. To be honest, it's not a fantastic experience... though I want to emphasise that I don't mean this as any sort of insult or slight to the dev team of Haiku. I suppose the reality is that it's pretty amazing they've gotten as far as they have, without being able to freely use the source code from BeOS, which in my opinion is hugely disappointing because no one was willing or able to anything with it in a proprietary or commercial sense.
I view the collapse of Be as story about the many failings of the broader tech industry and the irrationality of the dot com bubble and not in any way an indication of the technical merits of the BeBox or BeOS.
Anyway, Haiku as it is today is kinda like what BeOS was back then but obviously incomplete in several really important ways. Meanwhile the world has moved on and I do everything I used to do in BeOS (and more) with Linux. Though I do wonder what BeOS might look like now had they not collapsed back then.
The first one that really stuck in my mind is BetaMax and I suppose the collapse of Be, makers of the BeBox and BeOS, was the most discouraging... though I've seen a lot of other brands & companies I liked fail.