Many times when I discuss web3/crypto with people and express skepticism about its potential, people respond along the lines of "well, that's what the skeptics said about the Internet too."<p>I'm wonder what are some good examples of technologies in the last ~30 years that were hyped up, but then completely fizzled out and ultimately proved the tech skeptics right? AR/VR comes to mind, but I think it's too early to make the call there
AR/VR is a strange one.<p>(1) It keeps proliferating. First there was VR, then there was AR, then MR, and lately XR. Thank God there are more than 26 Unicode letters so they can keep playing this game for a very long time. Once they got to "X" I started to think: is at the point that Lundbergh from "Office Space" can ask "What's our XR Strategy?"<p>(2) VR has been central to our culture (realized in our imagination) since about 1990. There are so many things culturally interesting about the movie <i>Ready Player One</i> such as: Mark Zuckerberg seems to have never seen it, I keep wanting to conflate it with <i>Sword Art Online</i>, it's about the future but also about the past, it appeals to all generations whether or not you've played video games, Spielberg can get away with shameless nostalgia because he was a titan of the time period being reminisced on. It's successful being visionary precisely because it is conservative enough that everybody "gets it"<p>(3) VR and AR are highly successful in particular niches. (E.g. you can afford a Hololens 2 if it is going to keep you from making a million-dollar mistake building a building)<p>Lately I've been discovering that the AR/VR storytelling concepts actually work well if you ditch the glasses and turn the optical system inside out to use projectors to paint over the physical world and create visions that people can share.
Segway scooters come to mind: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_Inc</a>.<p>I remember in the early aughts when these things first came out, there was press talking about how cities were going to be rebuilt to accommodate them as a primary mode of transportation. Now, they're basically a novelty mode of transport with a few niche use-cases.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_television" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_television</a> "As of 2017, most 3D TV sets and services are no longer available"
In the 90s, I was for some reason the go-to guy to evaluate new hotshot technologies for the department.<p>I gradually realized that I could be replaced by a 3x5 card that said "It sucks". I don't even remember all of the things I deprecated. Pretty much every single cover of Wired Magazine, for starters. I even came to a rule: if it's on the cover of Wired, it's because it's never going to work, or because it's already common knowledge. (I was very annoyed to see the replaceable-car-battery thing there, because it seemed like a good idea and the rule meant it wouldn't work. And it didn't.)<p>There were exactly 2 times that the 3x5 card would have disagreed with me:<p>1. Java
2. Web browsers<p>To be honest, I under-estimated #2. I knew browsers were important, but I didn't foresee them basically replacing desktops.<p>In general, tech skeptics are nearly always right, if only because of Sturgeon's Law. The vast majority of everything is trash. Perhaps by the time it reaches the level of notoriety merely 80% of everything that's trash.<p>If you want a list of tech that failed, go look at the list of Wired covers.
Many people said that there was no way the Apollo program would have repaid itself.<p>And in fact it had to be shutdown because it was bankrupting NASA.<p>Same for the ISS and the LHC although the latter still has some time to make it back, but it would have to be one hell of a comeback because the discovery of the Higgs Boson and then nothing else was the nightmare scenario which promplty materialized itself.<p>Also fusion.
I had a demo of an Autodesk VR system in <i>1992</i>; in 30 years they've not even managed to come up with new promises to sell, let alone any actual progress towards fulfilling those promises. If that's "too early to call" then you have an unusually long time horizon for your thinking, and I salute you.<p>What "web3" has going for it that say, "E-gold" didn't is official neglect. People used to feel that the existence of laws against these kind of scams was sufficient reason to stay away from them; enforcement or not.
The Internet Bubble and the DotCom crash. The subsequent ubiquity of the internet doesn't absolve the reality of the over-hyped internet bubble during the early years.
VST3 is up there, it "solved" a lot of problems (in doing so, made the simple stuff way harder). Bunch of hype back in 2008, and it never caught on. Ten years later they stopped licensing VST2 because still, no one was writing VST3 plugins en masse. 14 years later, people are still preferring to make VST2 where possible.
One of the main problems is that crypto projects start with an absurd valuation of what they could become in 10 years. We never had something like that?<p>If you make everybody rich in a company from the start, very little motivation and innovation are left.
Flying cars?<p>There's been many proposed and built, but they haven't really 'taken off'.<p>Also "personal air vehicles" i.e. human carrying quadcopters and the like. Lots of press, still nothing commercially available after years.
The Segway comes to mind as something that was disproportionately hyped up compared to its end result. Quoting a TIME magazine article from 2001 [0]:<p>> <i>As big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet, said John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, Amazon.com and now Ginger.</i><p>> [Inventor Dean] <i>Kamen's aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy."</i><p>[0] <a href="http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,...</a>
"AR/VR comes to mind, but I think it's too early to make the call there"<p>Are you willing to make calls for things that were so many decades early that even if they do eventually happen they aren't really the same tech anymore? People put real money into AR/VR in the late 1990s and had a real marketing push behind it. It was definitely wrong. If it happens to be right a literal human generation (~40 years generally) later, well, I don't really think it made the people pushing it in the 90s right about what they were saying <i>then</i>.<p>AI has an even bigger one, with its own name: AI Winter. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter</a> Another case of what they were promising simply wasn't possible at the time and skeptics are right. That one we're already a full human generation away from, and again, nobody at the time was going "Give me money now, and in 40 years we'll definitely have AI going!" And even now, while we have tech that does some things they wouldn't have dared to dream of, our current tech also still can't do some things they promised were just around the corner.<p>There's also a class of "technology failure" I'm a bit of a fan of myself, which is, the technology that fails to live up to its promises even though it doesn't die out. SQL is a failure... it is not possible for casual business people to do away with database engineers because the language is so easy to write. Obviously, SQL lives on even so, but it failed out of its original goal. In fact there's several things that started life as "we'll get rid of programmers" like that, such as COBOL.<p>Object orientation is a failure; the promise was that we'd end up with huge libraries of reusable components such that all programming would be just wiring them together. We have a huge number of libraries of basic "objects", we have a huge number of libraries of frameworks and other really big things, but there's a vast wasteland in the middle. You can <i>never</i> just go up to the Object Repository and grab a User object for your application. You also need some bespoke user model for everything. You can't just grab a permission system. You can grab a permission engine, but you have to wire a whole bunch of things up because even if you do grab a framework that tries to do this all for you the third thing the PM does is spec a permission like "The user is allowed to delegate to other users that they're allowed to see a subset of their content based on a regular expression, as long as it's authorized by their team administrator" and you're back to writing real code.<p>Semantic web has been around multiple iterations of the hype loop by now. It was a promise to turn the entire web into a graph database. It is reduced to claiming success when Google writes very powerful ML stuff to extract basic information about a business from their home page and presenting it as a widget on the search results, using essentially no "semantic web" technologies in the process. It isn't anything like what it was supposed to be.