Author Topic: Where has your crystal ball failed?  (Read 2149 times)

littleman

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Where has your crystal ball failed?
« on: April 21, 2021, 05:23:19 AM »
Here are a few things I really got wrong:

  • Google's stock was way over priced at their IPO
  • The iPad was a stupid idea, who would want a computer without a mouse and keyboard?
  • Netflix back-burnering DVD rentals in favor of streaming will never work

« Last Edit: April 21, 2021, 07:11:20 AM by littleman »

BoL

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2021, 07:50:50 AM »
Minidiscs will be the future of music

Brad

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #2 on: April 21, 2021, 10:40:56 AM »
Computers will always have a CD drive.

Smartphones will always have an earbud plug.

I really thought by now that we would be driving on tires that required no air inflation. Boy was I wrong.

I did not see or comprehend the negative effects social networks would have on politics, society, democracy.

rcjordan

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #3 on: April 21, 2021, 11:43:18 AM »
Amazon.

That's it, the rest I got right. hhh

ergophobe

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #4 on: April 21, 2021, 03:37:00 PM »
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.

Rupert

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #5 on: April 22, 2021, 06:17:00 AM »
Fortunately, I have forgotten most. The big ones that float to the top in my mind more often than I am prepared to admit are:

I used to laugh at Amazon making a loss every year, while we made profits. That they only sold books, when the options for them were so huge. I just did not understand their business approach.
Never saw Google getting SOOO big
Completely misunderstood bitcoin.

Frustration for missing them I think.

Quote
- I will never have a wedding
  I think that a great fail to have.
... Make sure you live before you die.

creative666

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #6 on: April 22, 2021, 12:58:55 PM »
There's no way they can put another coffee shop in my neighborhood - I seem to get that wrong every month! Some new joint opens and people flock to it like they've never had coffee before - there are 17 at present!

ergophobe

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #7 on: April 22, 2021, 05:18:04 PM »
Completely misunderstood bitcoin.

Could you elaborate? Maybe that's it's own thread.

Quote
Quote
- I will never have a wedding
  I think that a great fail to have.

I had always hoped I would find someone to spend my life with, I just thought marriages and weddings were antiquated vestiges of a patriarchal, religious society, and therefore I would not marry and, if I had to for legal reasons, would certainly not have a wedding. That's what I changed my mind on.

Drastic

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #8 on: April 22, 2021, 06:30:01 PM »
Big one last summer, I really thought we were coming out of Covid. Spent a bunch of money on the company/facility and about lost my tail over it.

Rupert

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Re: Where has your crystal ball failed?
« Reply #9 on: April 23, 2021, 05:16:11 AM »
Completely misunderstood bitcoin.

Could you elaborate? Maybe that's it's own thread.


I just thought it was a geeks gaming tool, that might help a few low-level crooks to move money about. That it would never get to the value it is now. I write this looking up the data and see it has just dropped by nearly 10% in the last 24 hours.
I guess in some ways the jury is still out, it might not make it more than a couple more years but had I foreseen its current value I would have bought some.

We discussed it here I think and mining it to me seemed a waste of time, as the price you got for it in the early days was about the cost of the electricity used to mine it. And so I suppose I thought it had no value and not worth buying.
The next problem is that had I bought say 10, lets say 10 years ago when would I have sold them?  Probably quite soon after they started rising, unless I forgot them.  My tolerance for that sort of risk is quite low.
The huge bounces would have killed my nerves, and I would have sold too early to put it into something more solid... like bricks :)

But back to what I missed in my crystal ball. It is now clearly a product traded on a big scale. I still cannot take away the feeling that replace bitcoin for Tulips, and the same thing will eventually happen.  But like creative666 and his coffee houses, I saw the rises in 2010 as the peak at the time..... I keep seeing the peak but no one else seems to.


... Make sure you live before you die.