Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial proposal.

But the rollout, that was just the worst way to ever get a product into the hands of users. If you got in they gave you some number of invites. You'd set them up to be sent out to your friends or coworkers or whatever. Turned out, it just put them in a queue to eventually get an invite. Wave was fundamentally a collaboration platform, without anyone to collaborate with it had zero value. Fantastic way to fail.

Peer-to-peer file sharing.

There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes.

I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading.

I would piggyback on the social graph of existing networks to get started. I actually had a prototype of the friend discovery code, based on XMPP (using custom stanzas). You login with your credentials, and it shows you all your friends that are using the same app. It worked with GTalk, Facebook Messenger, and Skype (via Skype API). One nice feature was that this worked without getting an API key from Facebook etc., or having a central server. I was so pissed when they all changed their APIs to make this impossible. It felt like a conspiracy to stop this use case.

I still think if somebody pulled this off, it might work, and it would be pretty distruptive (in the good and the bad sense of the word). It would be the last word in the debate between "data wants to be free, change society to enable what technology promises" and "data has to be a commodity, restrict technology because in capitalism we can't feed artists otherwise".

I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging.

Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago.

But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" and results would come up. You could enter your data, interests, hobbies, etc. in the program and mark yourself as available (only if you wanted) and it was a really nice way to meet people. I collected stamps at the time so I remember I would search for people who were stamp collectors in countries for which I had no stamp, leading to stamp exchanges apart from some interesting conversation (as you could also throw some of your interests in in the search window).

I thought that was the future and the tech could only get better from there, but then came MSN Messenger, with really bare-bones features in general and in particular no "searchable" functionality, and displaced ICQ. And since then, nothing similar has appeared. Instant messengers are focused on talking to people you already know, and if you want to meet new people, you have to use specific-purpose communities or dating sites. But good luck finding someone who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music at the same time... That function of searching people by interests in a huge directory of people (not restricted, e.g., to a dating site) is what I thought would take the world by storm, and as far as I know it doesn't even exist anymore at enough scale to be meaningful, at least in the West (maybe in WeChat, QQ or one of those apps used in Asia they have something similar, I don't know).

E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.

Paypal used to have this feature that allowed you to install a browser add-on and you could generate a CC number on the fly that was good for either one time use or recurring use (for subscription services). This feature served two primary purposes: 1) to be able to pay using PayPal on sites that didn't support it 2) to help prevent against fraud which was becoming a massive problem at the time. If the number was stolen, it immediately wasn't good anymore and a hacker/thief could not use the CC number to purchase/steal anything.

It was that second aspect that I thought would totally eliminate all credit card fraud and make people comfortable with online purchases on smaller sites. I have no idea why PayPal killed the program, but even before it did, not many people used it. I was the only person I knew that was even aware it existed.

EDIT - if anyone is curious, I looked it up. Two ex-PayPal employees explain here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-PayPal-discontinue-their-one-t...

F#. Back in 2006 I first stumbled upon it and was amazed. It had so much potential. Everything C# did, and more, better. I was sure we'd see 20% of MS devs moving to it.

I underestimated the momentum of MS, the power of embarrassment of hiring a high-profile figure to be shown up by a researcher, the incredible anti-FP and even anti-generics...resentment(?) that MS kept towards them. Plus the insane comments from actual developers that literally did not understand the basics of C# ("C is a subset of C#" and "var is dynamic typing" <- comments from a public high-profile MS hire).

I've basically given up hope on programming becoming better over time. A lot of apps are boring grunt work anyway, so the edge in using better tools can be beaten just by throwing a lot of sub-par people at it.

On the plus side, for people looking to strike it rich in "tech", knowing tech isn't really a prerequisite. Persistence and the 'hacker' spirit, even if it means you spend all night writing something in PHP that would literally be one line if you know what you were doing, hey, that's what leads to big exits.

BeOS . That was the best os at the time by far, stellar performance, fantastic C++ api usable by a newbie, i still haven’t found a GUI as responsive as this one.

DVD-audio. Great multi channel, high rate, high resolution audio. But it required the whole production chain to upgrade as well as new consumer equipement, and they competed with sony own format ( which was also a failure)... But it would have given the record industry a few more years of revenue before the bandwidth would have been sufficient to download or stream music with this resolution.

The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.

Near-field communication (NFC).

It came out in 2010 for Android and Microsoft phones, but has been hamstrung by Apple for most of its development. I had several startup ideas which required NFC market penetration on phones, but which even today are impractical due to Apple's chokehold on NFC APIs for fear of a payments competitor.

In order to even find "tap to pair" devices, you often need to seek out the one manufacturer or option available. There should be personal phone-to-phone "tap to pay" by e-cash or cryptocurrency. "Tap to auth" using your phone. "Tap to key exchange" should be part of doing business, sending "business card" contact details as well. Samsung had S-Beam, "tap to share files" securely with WiFI Direct.

But even with the addition of Core NFC, you need to find a responsible adult with an Android phone to even write a single bit as an iPhone owner.

GWT.

To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc.

GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc.

You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparently back and forth between the client and the server.

It was released in around 2006, it was not without issues but seemed to be a much better way to develop complex client code than the Javascript options available in 2006, as far as I could see.

It never really took off.

Google moved their team over to Dart at some point. I guess the Oracle Java lawsuit meant Google were unenthusiastic about continuing to have anything to do with Java where they didn't need to.

The compile times were slow. Not all Java compiled so you had to have a mental model in your head not only of Java but also the Javascript that was going to be generated which was mental overhead.

The semantic web. It spawned an entire generation of academic study, but aside from assuring job security for researchers hasn't amounted to anything beyond their ivory towers.

WebGL. I spent ~10 years doing Flash / ActionScript and when Jobs nixed the mobile Flash plugin, I figured everything would shift to HTML5 / WebGL. Nope. The era of fancy, interactive websites faded into the rearview mirror.

I'm sure most of you don't miss it, but there was so much amazing work. Rather than the budgets shifting to Three.js etc, it went to apps or dried up completely.

Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest.

Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.

I'm disappointed none of the various constructed "universal" languages (like Esperanto) ever took off. Having a single common language spoken by everyone would be enormously useful. As it is, the closest we have is English, but it's a natural language and therefore complicated and difficult to learn.

Optical computing. I remember talking to a bloke working on it back in 1990, and he said they had a working optical transistor so all the hard bits were done. Soon we'd have computers that used multiple frequencies of light to process operations concurrently on the same hardware!

Still waiting...

The Lytro Camera[1]. The idea of refocusing a photo after the fact felt like an absolute revelation. Their initial camera was somewhat affordable, but ended up being just downright awful. The pictures were low res, low quality, and the camera was difficult to use and lacked basic, yet essential functions. I was a super-excited early adopter. After I got the camera I think I took, maybe 100 pictures with mine and it's sat in a box of disappointment ever since, because you couldn't actually do anything with the crummy pictures it took. All I wanted was a reasonably good 4MP image where I could refocus a picture on my kid's face when the camera focused on the wall behind her so I could send that picture to grandma, or post it to facebook. They clearly had something else very different in mind and the novelty of all the interactive-y stuff they added around the refocusing forgot that what we(I) actually wanted was a picture.

It's all fine that I ended up not taking more pictures becuase the one place you could see them is being shut down at the end of the month.

They appear to have pivoted to professional cinema.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/06/lytro-camera-lets-you-focus-ph...

3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.

CRISPR.

My naivete surrounded me. I didn't realize that even though there was a high output of genetic marker tests that very few if of them would result in viable CRISPR targets.

There's 60K genetic marker tests on the market.

8 to 10 new ones come out each day.

Humanity has little hope of figuring out the sort of "druggable targets."

Genome Wide Association Studies aren't like websites or apps waiting to be optimized with more data.

The more data you feed in the more obfuscated the truth becomes.

Drug discovery is hard and CRISPR modifications are technology way ahead of clear problem framing.

https://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2017/03/targets-drugability-...

For 12 years, I've had a chronic autoimmune disorder that I had hoped would be solved by the likes of a massive genetic dataset of Ulcerative Colitis twins that had been separated at birth where one twin had the disease and the other didn't.

I had hoped that CRISPR would be the solution given enough problem context from a solid GWAS, but this was foolish.

Our best bets in biotech are not in the latest technologies, they are in ensuring that basic science, phase 0, and phase 1 trials get large unfettered funding.

I had hoped Liz Parrish's outfit would make leaps and bounds in genetic modification for patients like me, but that ended up being baloney. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11560943

CRISPR technologies are like bullets to attack problems, but the operator is always increasingly blind. Bonferroni Corrections abound and family wise error rate are unforgiving in all things related to GWAS studies.

Adobe Air. HTML/CSS/JS in a native executible with access to native methods? It sounded like a dream. ANd yeah, you can do Adobe Air without Flash. You could build desktop apps and phone apps with the same tools on top of it. I really liked the desktop stuff.

I made a couple of apps and used a ton of Adobe Air apps (non-Flash) back in the day. Thought it was the future.

It failed, for some reason.

^^^^ this is the reason why the rise of Electron wasn't surprising to me. In fact, I was surprised by people being surprised. I realize that Electron is WAY more sophisticated but "desktop web apps" have been around for a while.

I am still waiting for all my favourite applications to be extendable in GNU Guile.

On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general.

Google Glass. I thought this would become standard, miniaturized, and used in all aspects of life. Perhaps I read Daemon too much, but I was sure Glass would fly

The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market.

By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on.

However, we just haven't seen that. We have a lot of gambling, a lot of whales moving the waters, and a lot of irrational exuberance.

But no solid tech. It's still early, but I haven't even heard of anything in the works that really knocks my boots off. All in all, I'm glad people are getting rich (although my hunch is that most getting rich were so to begin with), but so far the tech part of it all has been a big disappointment.

I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.

Semantic ontologies that would totally change the nature of search.

3D Sports. 2005, in Austin one local theater showed the National Championship in 3D. To this day this was the best football viewing experience I've come across. During the game, I could see the holes open for running backs as they opened and later closed in a split second. I felt like I was actually on the field as a player as the game played out. At half time, everyone gathered in the lobby of the theater and there was just this feeling that this was the future of watching sports in talking to other people.

I was convinced at that time that 3D would eventually be the way that everyone watched sports and that this would eventually top the in game experience. I'm still surprised that theaters and sports networks haven't partnered to display more sporting events in this fashion.

Separate screen for touching on the back of the mobile device.

I forgot how the device was called, but there was a Blackberry or similar device that didn't have your oily fingers smearing the very screen you're trying to interact with. You didn't obscure the display with fingers. Instead, the touch-sensitive rectangle was on the back of the device, and cursor was displayed on front side, in the spot corresponding to the spot you touched.

The Commodore Amiga. Used it from release in 1985 through to 1993, at which point I had to admit defeat and defect. Much has been written, including a great retrospective on Ars, but its failure wasn't due to engineering. Way ahead of its time.

Minidisc. This was generally popular in Hong Kong and Japan, perhaps other parts of the world, but in the US I gather it was marketed as a CD alternative instead of a mix-tape alternative. Digital copy protection hobbled the latter immediately, of course. I still used a pair of them ten years after getting my first player as a poor man's two-track recorder.

In the '90s I was convinced that basically everything with a name attached to it was going to be built around PowerPC and MIPS processors. When StrongARM went to Intel, I figured ARM was basically dead outside of controller/coprocessor/offload applications and expected Pentium II/III to suffer a similar fate to Pentium Pro.

I remember being in high school when Google Plus came out and thinking it would be incredibly popular. I totally missed the mark, and it's funny because while I thought it would take off with other people, I never really used it myself.

X3D - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D

Rationale: It was the 1990s, VRML flew but didn't quite make it. 3D hardware acceleration had arrived, gaming was exploding, Descent and Quake had proven complex worlds and freedom of movement were possible on commodity hardware, and talk of buffering 3D content in video streams seemed to make perfect sense for next generation passive entertainment. Product placements, architectural documentation, mechanical design courses, etc.

What killed it (IMHO): Took too long to standardize, too much formalism, no consumer electronics manufacturers on board sending actual products to market. If they had done an IETF approach ("rough consensus and running code") they may not have missed the window of opportunity.

I thought (and still think) the phone as single computing device is going to replace desktops and laptops via some kind of dock of some sort. There's been a few attempts at it by Dell and Microsoft and a few others, but none really satisfactory.

I think the most successful to date is the Nintendo Switch.

The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?

I thought this was going to be 'The VR Thread.'

I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable decision.

But beyond this, I don't really understand why it didn't catch on. The first time I tried it I was hooked simply due to the issue of presence. Though perhaps the fact I ended up never purchasing a device answers my own question -- I had no interest in a Facebook driven platform, and the price point to get involved with VR for things like the Vive did not mesh well with the availability of software, as well as the fact that hardware tends to rapidly iterate.

I would have expected robots and automation technologies that replace human workers to come much faster to everyday life.

Of course this is happening in some areas, but not nearly as much as it could happen.

Just one example: It's easy to imagine running a shop that works with little to no workers. The closest thing that exists are these self-checkout cashiers, but even these aren't that prevalent, the norm is still a human cashier.

In early 2013 I read this article:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130220084442.h...

It described what seemed like an incredible advance in capacitor design that would allow xenon flashes to be installed in even the slimmest of smartphones.

I consider xenon flashes, which are found in most cameras that aren't smartphones, to be wildly superior to LED flashes, which are used in phones, and assumed that within a couple of years, the new technology would be ubiquitous.

But it never happened. So far as I know, the partnership between Nanyang Technological University and Xenon Technologies never really went anywhere.

After a couple of years of waiting, I even went so far as to try to contact the researchers to find out what happened, but never got a response.

I hope that someday this tech does hit the mass market. Although LED flash quality has improved somewhat, xenon flashes are still so much better.

I expected PCs to be in every home pretty much forever. Now a lot of non-tech people prefer phones and tablets.

I expected microtransaction games to take off, but not in the form of "pay to win" as it is today.

I expected things like buying side quests or episodes for games. People could just pay for as much content as they would play. It would have been similar to how musicians could sell singles instead of albums.

Paradox games and CS:GO seem to have adopted this model very well but it never happened in mobile games, where microtransactions would have been most successful.

Mobile/Micro payments. There is still no friction free solution, where I would be sure, my mother could use it.

Kinect - such a human interface that doesn't require direct integration with hardware or technical knowledge or buttons, and a lot of fun in the games I played. But it failed.

The open web, open OSes, open in general. We (average HN users) use these things but most people use walled garden platforms all the time. For non techies the trend is that way. Computing market seems to be bisecting into pro and consumer.

Two issues have prevented this open computing for the masses IMO:

1. Spam and malware. Any open system that gets any user base becomes spam hell. This is even happening to the more open of the walled gardens now (e.g. YouTube) so the future will likely be even more closed.

2. People like "free" and with no revenue stream you can't pay programmers to work on the parts that are not fun. This includes UX, which is a brutal grind. Walled gardens have a revenue stream from being surveillance driven advertising platforms users can't customize.

Flying cars. I remember seeing prototypes in late 80s and early 90s, constantly showing up on Discovery Channel programs I watched as a kid like Beyond 2000 or Next Step.

Over time it seemed increasingly far out, but, possible. Eventually I realized things like how catastrophic a break down or accident would be meant it will likely never happen. I and everyone else who thought flying cars were on the horizon were suckers.