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:
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My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of
lynxon 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.
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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.
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After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering
youtube-dlmuch less useful, theyt-dlpproject 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?
I never thought game subscription would take of. The entire concept is stupid to me. Pay per month to *acces selected games but not own them? Take into accoumt 90% of people will play at most 25% of the catalogue. Let's do some math if PS Plus Essentials, where you get 2-4 random titles per month is taken, which costs 9€ per month which if you play down to 25% of the catalogue goes up to 36€ per month (that is you basicly pay 36€ to play that single game which was chosen at random and you still don't own). For that ammount of money I can buy a REAL game I OWN or 5 good games on Steam Sale or GOG.
Still I guess if it sounds good people will smoke it.
To be clear these statistics are purly "Trust me bro" but I doubt someone will play Core Keeper, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and NFS: Unbound all in one month enough that it makes sense, and if you can more power to you, but I know those are not most people. Most people play Minecraft or Elder Scrolls or COD or GT etc.
Still feel free to express yours opinion.
I'm generally against the rise of subscriptions in every service on the Internet, but I did actually benefit from game pass for a couple years. Access to the library meant I could try a lot of games I otherwise probably would not have played. I was only out the time I spent downloading and playing them if I didn't like them- no need to deal with returns or resale, which is especially difficult/restrictive for digital purchases.
I can't find what the original price for game pass was, but I'll do the break-even math for the current price: It looks like the highest tier game pass subscription today is ~$30/mo. Multiply by 12 months, that's $360/yr. With games typically costing $60-70, $360/yr divided by $60 is 6 games/yr.
One would need to play > 6 new games each year to save money with xbox game pass. I think that number is pretty achievable for the average gamer, but I'd be curious to see some statistics about average game consumption.