I think that it’s interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.

Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn’t make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn’t pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn’t or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.

Four from me:

• My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of lynx on a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then.

• In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn’t think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.

• When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it’s safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.

• After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering youtube-dl much less useful, the yt-dlp project came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn’t tolerate this — it seems to me to have all the drawbacks of youtube-dl from their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn’t be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven’t throttled or blocked it.

Anyone else have some of their own that they’d like to share?