I'm mostly wrong, but here are some greatest misses, both "global" and "personal"...
- people do not want to buy books online. They want to browse.
- digital cameras will not be a serious photographer's tool because the resolution won't get high enough fast enough. I also failed to envision how many more photos I would take once the marginal cost of a photo went to zero and "development" was instant.
- Google, Amazon and most recently Airbnb stocks are overpriced
- Chrome doesn't seem likely to have a strong return for Google
- The market is due for a correction - I've been wrong about this every month except the rare ones where there was a correction
- by the time I was ready to buy a new car, gas cars would be rare (2004 prediction based on buying a new car around 2015)
- I want to be a teaching professor and am only doing the research part of grad school to get that teaching job (ca 1987 prediction that was untrue by 1997 when I realized I only wanted to do the research part, which is what I did for the next 15 years).
- I will never have a wedding
- I will not have any savings when I hit retirement age and will be a Wal-Mart greeter (very glad to now be on track to be quite wrong about this one, especially since Wal-Mart doesn't have greeters anymore)
- we will have space tourism by the late 1990s and bases on the moon
- podcasting is not something worthy of attention (in 2003-2004, when the iPod was about 2-3 years old, before the iPhone, WMW member ScottM for whom I was doing some programming scraping and regurgitating SERPS and things like that, was trying to convince me that we should start some business around podcasting because it was going to be big. I didn't own an iPod and didn't know many people with iPods and it seemed outlandishly niche)
- The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall will endure longer than I will
I think I'm only scratching the surface
>>I did not see or comprehend
That's a much longer list.
Brad - I would say the one place where I feel I tend to be right is predictions about the future of democracy in the US, social media and similar, but I will put that down not to vision, so much as an inherent bias, rooted in an obsession with Brave New World beginning circa 1978, that has unfortunately proven mostly correct and which I hope will prove to be less visionary in the future. But I always thought the republic would die via Brave New World rather than 1984 or, as Neil Postman famously put it, by amusing ourselves to death. So I was primed to see social media as a problem.